Endymion Rising

OLYMPIANS

2011-09-14T13:38:00.000-07:00

In the month of July in 2010, No Nude Men Productions, one of San Francisco’s longest running indy theater troupes, rolled out twelve new full-length plays written by fourteen local writers, each one focusing on one of the twelve Olympian gods of Ancient Greece.

Now the San Francisco Olympians Festival is back, and bigger than before! This year the festival features thirty-two new plays including nine new full lengths, the coll...ective work of twenty-nine local writers! Over the course of twelve nights each play will be given a staged and rehearsed reading at the Exit Theater by some of the best and brightest of the San Francisco acting scene. Additionally, the theater itself will contain an ongoing exhibit of thirty-nine original, themed art pieces being generated for the show’s publicity by twelve local artists. Door prizes themed to each night will round out the evening’s entertainment.

Truly an unusual event, this year’s festival has been themed around the celestial myths and deities, with the planets, constellations and various sky gods as the themes of the evening. Performances run Thursday, Friday and Saturday, October 6-29, 8 PM at the Exit Theater (156 Eddy Street, San Francisco). Admission is $10.00 a night, with a “buy four, get the fifth one free” option (and yes, we had lots of people who saw as many as ten shows last year). Every night is unique and draws a new audience, so reservations are not necessary but more information can be found at www.sfolympians.com.

Additionally, we have an Opening Party at the Café Royale (800 Post Street) at 8 PM on October 1st, with free food, a sneak peak at what shows are happening at the festival, and the unveiling of the this years artwork, which will hang at the Café Royale for the month of October. Food will be provided by Mezes, www.mezessf.com.

The artists whose work is represented are: Christopher Bauman, Molly Benson, Liz Conley, Brett Grunig, Chelsea Harper, Emily C. Martin, Adam Miller, Kelly McClellen, Cody Rishell, Celeste Shulte, Gintah Tran.

The plays, dates and authors are as follows:

Week One (Thursday, Friday, Saturday): STAR-SPANGLED HEROES

October 6: HERACLES AND THE THINGS HE’S KILLEDby Team Thunderbird (Bryce Allemann, Dana Constance, Kathy Hicks, Sang Kim, Kai Morrison), directed by Kai Morrison
The story of Heracles receives a few much-needed corrections from the only man who would know: his twin brother. You knew he had one, right?

October 7: HUNTER AND HUNTED

Orion by Meg Cohen, directed by Claire Rice
Joe "Orion" Ryan is a neo-noir cop drama set in the landscape of gritty
1970s cinema classics, where the men wear moustaches and the women wear
guns.

Canis Major by Claire Rice, directed by Claire Rice
It's the dog days of summer ,and man's best friend is a beat poet.

Scorpio by Seanan Palmero, directed by Claire Rice
Good old fashioned revenge and new age technology clash as Scorpio, an embittered short order cook, and Antares, his smart phone, track Orion through the desert.

October 8: PERSEIAD SHOWER

Perseus by Bryce Duzan, directed by Bryce Duzan
A warrior and a prince fight against royalty, society, and the gods themselves to defend their love for each other.

Andromeda Bound by Helen Noakes, directed by Stuart Bousel
When a hero meets a damsel in distress, bondage takes on a whole new meaning.

Pegasus by Daniel Heath, directed by Stuart Bousel
Pegasus and Bellerophon must defeat the Chimera, but can a legend really die?

Cetus by Kirk Shimano, directed by Stuart Bousel
It’s just your average, ordinary high school reunion for mythical whales.

Cassiopeia by Christian Simonsen, directed by Stuart Bousel
It's not easy being a beautiful queen and a loving mother... so Cassiopeia chose one out of two.

Week Two (Thursday, Friday, Saturday): LORDS OF LIGHT

October 13: Uranus by Evelyn Jean Pine, directed by Rik Lopes
1956. Rock and roll is tearing apart The First Family of Country Music. Mama kinda likes it, but Daddy’s agin it, and the boys are ready to rip everything apart.

October 14: Chronus by Bennett Fisher, directed by Jessica Holt
A play about how we make gods and monsters out of our politicians.

October 15: A DAY IN THE LIGHT OF…

Hyperion to a Saytr by Stuart Bousel, directed by Stuart Bousel
A romantic comedy meditation on status, glamour and identity in post-modern San Francisco where status has become the ultimate goal and lifestyle has very little to do with what’s important in life.

Eos by Kendra Arimoto, directed by Stuart Bousel
True love? Check. Immortality? Check. Eternal Youth? F*@$k.

Nyx by David Duman, directed by Stuart Bousel
Before there was Earth, there was Night. She hasn't left since.

Week Three (Thursday, Friday, Saturday): FAMILY AFFAIRS

October 20: Gemini by Tom Darter, directed by Karen Hogan
An overly ambitious trope on Plautus and The Comedy of Errors: It has three sets of twins! That's right: three! Plus: Zeus (King of the Gods) and Hera (Queen of the Gods)! More fun than humanly possible!

October 21: FALLING STARS

Icarus by Jeremy Cole, directed by Jeremy Cole
In this tale of two Icaruses - one mythical, one actual - the sky is (quite literally) the limit.

Phaethon by Ashley Cowan, directed by Ashley Cowan
Tortured by talent, the reality of time passing, and the need to be forever remembered, steer this story of Phaeton; a one act about a boy trying to find his place among the stars.

Eosphosphorus by Sean Kelly, directed by Claire Rice
Things get explosive when the Night demands Eosphosphorus either stop his tilting at windmills or start looking for a new place to live.

Hard Pack by Lise Catherine Miller, directed by Lise Catherine Miller
The rivalry between partners of a snowplow dealership in the snowy Northeast reaches epic proportions.

Zephyrus by Neil Higgins, directed by Claire Rice
A love triangle and sibling rivalry lurk the halls of a British university with dangerous results.

Hesperus by Claire Rice, directed by Claire Rice
An uneasy peace comes to a breaking point on the boundary between heaven and hell.

October 22: Pleiades by Marissa Skudlarek, directed by Liz Anderson
It's 1971 and the seven daughters of an industry titan are caught between the patriarchal past and the feminist future.

Week Four (Thursday, Friday, Saturday): LADIES OF THE NIGHT

October 27: Selene by Nirmala Nataraj, directed by Amy Clare Tasker
Memories, dreams, premonitions, gods and mortals intersect in a Northern California facility for Alzheimer's patients.

October 28: ORBITING JUPITER
Metis by Maria Leigh, directed by Emlyn Guiney
How does a relationship alter the identity of the individual? How does a cycle get broken and at what cost? Can anything good come from swallowing your wife?”

Io by Christian Simonsen, directed by Emlyn Guiney
What happens to a mortal woman when she reaches an age where legends no longer
have a use for her?

Europa by Claire Rice, directed by Neil Higgins
She's been carried away by the man of her dreams, but who is he by the light of day?

Leda by Kirk Shimano, directed by Neil Higgins
Who knew bestiality could be so educational?

Callisto by Seanan Palmero, directed by Neil Higgins
Artemis and Zeus are treed by an angry bear.

Ganymede by Neil Higgins, directed by Neil Higgins
A Republican Senator and his new aide discover controversial feelings for each other and the senator must choose between his longings and his political ambitions.

Elara and Himalia by Alison Luterman, directed by Emlyn Guiney
When you’re a wife of Zeus your duty isn’t just to him, but his new wife too.

October 29: Hecate by M.R. Fall, directed by Julia Heitner
Question: What do Hecate, Copland's Hoe-Down, a bunch of horse references, and your period have in common? Answer: This play.

The phenomenal acting company includes:

Teresa Attridge, Maggie Ballard, Timothy Beagley, Jerry Blair, Tonyanna Borkovi, Sara Briendel, Megan Briggs, Xanadu Bruggers, Nick Brunner, Kirsten Broadbear, Kat Bushnell, Sarah Rose Butler, Brianna Calabrese, Tony Cirimele, Megan Cohen, Benji Cooper, Robert Cooper, Kevin Copps, Lisa Darter, Tom Darter, Elijah Diamond, Nicholas Dickson, Siobhan Doherty, Julianna Egley, Alisha Ehrlich, Maria Fe Picar, Rachel Ferensowicz, Jeff Fisher, Jennie Gebhardt, Jan Gilbert, Kelley B. Greer, Maro Guevera, Matt Gunnison, Anne Hallinan, Eric Hannan, John Lennon Harrison, Neil Higgins, Dashiell Hillman, Travis Howse, Michelle Jasso, Dan Kurtz, Stewart Kramer, Charles Lewis III, Carl Lucania, Jennifer Lucas, Jan Marsh, Brian Martin, Gabrielle Motarjemi, Kai Morrison, Tonya Narvaez, Meg O'Connor, Karen Offereins, Allison Page, Sunil Patel, Allison Payne, Jason Pienkowski, Keshuv Prasad, Shane Rhodes, Cynthia Roberts, Paul Rodrigues, Stacy Sanders, Sarah Savage, Lauren Spencer, Analisa Svehaug, Brian Thomen, Leota Tisdel Rhodes, Nicholas Trengove, Vahishta Vafadari, Richard Wenzel, Lily Yang

2011-08-24T14:19:00.000-07:00

I recently participated in a survey of artistic directors of theater companies, which was kind of cool as it gave me a chance to think about aspects of this life I had never really put into words. So, for what it's worth, here are my answers...

Describe your job. In particular, please list and prioritize your key responsibilities as Artist Director.

My company is very small, so my job probably entails more than the usual Artistic Director. Mostly, I keep the company together. We’re more a confederation than a typical theater company, so the name of the game is “loosely organized”. I pick our projects, negotiate with spaces and venues and set up our schedule. I then appoint directors to helm each project, and over-see them (they are free to pick their own casts, designers, etc.), provide opinions when asked and make myself as available as I can as a resource. The bulk of public relations and marketing tends to also fall into my lap, as do vendor negotiations, event planning and other elements of the production which are not show specific.

What are the primary factors/considerations that go into determining a season for your company?

Every play we decide to do has to run a gamut of questions, namely (1) Why do we need to tell this story and why now? (2) How will this play challenge us? (3) Is this play something we can actually pull off successfully? (4) Have we done this kind of play before and if so, how long ago and has enough time passed to justify us revisiting a genre/theme/style if we’re inclined to do that? We’re always trying to find a balance between offering a consistently good and challenging product, and also never doing the same thing twice in a row.

“The play’s the thing.” Agree? Explain how much of the commercial, artistic and critical success a theatrical production is the play itself verses the contribution of the creative team that stages it.

I think the commercial success of a play is impossible to predict, and when people go about trying to “manufacture a success” they are basically going to shoot themselves in the foot. Doing anything for the money is the wrong reason- you do it for the art, and if that just so happens to make money- fantastic. Generally speaking, I think audiences respond to sincerity and enthusiasm in productions, to good stories told by people who care about those stories. The most successful shows of my career, critically and financially, have almost always been one where I put the artistic values first, the financial concerns second, and picked a team of people who I knew believe in the work that we were doing- whether that was an experimental play or an established hit, a new work or a classic. The people behind a production are what make it worth watching; a good script is very important of course, but it’s just the starting point and ideally the playwright is one more person who is part of that team putting a show together.

What is most valuable and most difficult about collaboration in theatre?

The things which are the best part of collaborating are also often the most difficult: namely managing personalities and finding ways to get so many different people- writers, directors, producers, staff, designers, crew, actors, musicians, dancers, etc.- to work together and to all buy into the project at hand. Watching people break down boundaries between people and bring people together is my favorite thing in the world. But it’s tricky, sometimes, because in order to work in this art form you definitely need some ego- after all, you’re asking people to come watch something you made or help make, and you’re asking them to love it, pay for it and tell everyone else to come see it too. That takes a certain degree of pride and that same pride can sometimes create walls that make it hard to really connect with one another and a good show relies on connection between everyone involved- onstage and off stage. It’s why the theater is infamous for intense, prolific and productive relationships… and also for dramatic falling outs, vindictive grudges and internal politics of Machievellian proportions.

TWELFTH

2011-07-13T09:37:00.000-07:00

I know it's been a while. I've been incredibly busy. I'm about to open my third show with Theater in the Woods and as usual it's been an incredible labor of love and exhausting as could be- especially coming after a full spring season. Below I have pasted the full version of my director's note, which will appear in our programs starting with this Saturday's preview. For more information on the production, head to http://www.atmostheatre.com/welcome.html.

The only thing I am going to say about TWELFTH NIGHT is that it's more dangerous than it looks from the outside. Sure, it's not HAMLET, but that's kind of like saying a hippo isn't a great white: true, the later is bigger and more famous for ripping you to shreds, but the former is arguably more treacherous, possibly because fewer see it coming, essentially because they think it's cuddly and adorable. TWELFTH NIGHT surprises us in a way that HAMLET no longer has the ability to do; we know we're supposed to take THAT play seriously, but we haven't collectively agreed to recognize TWELFTH NIGHT as a the little Pandora's box of anxiety and violence that it actually is, and so it can still haunt us, subversively, in way that HAMLET has maybe lost. Our guard is up when we watch HAMLET, but it's down when we watch TWELFTH NIGHT. And while we're busy laughing at it is exactly when it gets us.

I have long maintained that Shakespeare's comedies are darker than his tragedies and I think that is most true here, in Ilyria, a world of pirates, thieves, drunks, liars, incompetents and pretenders, ruled by a pair of good-hearted but ineffectual aristocrats who have both become victims of their own mania: one obsessed with the dead who have abandoned her, the other obsessed with a romantic ideal he can't attain. The sanest person is a wandering musician who speaks almost entirely in riddles and despite being called "fool" never offers much in the way of comic relief- that being the job of the above mentioned drunks, thieves and liars. Into this wild coast Shakespeare sends his twins- compassionate, resourceful Viola, and dashing, loyal Sebastian- who must survive in a strange land without even the comfort of one another to cling to. It's an exciting story, for sure, but it's not a pretty one, and there is an air of despair in the many songs that anchor the play, a bitterness to the love poetry, and an undercurrent of violence and desperation to the comic sub plot about two status jumping servants who declare war on one another. Most markedly there is a fear of magic and yet a yearning for miracles- because people in Ilyria really need them. That's probably why I chose to set our production at the dawn of the New World. Social misfits trying to eek out some small handful of happiness in a hostile environment they really know nothing about is pretty much the one liner I would use if someone asked me to sum up this play, and I remember my American history teacher used much the same wording to describe the first wave of New Englanders.

And yet there is so much joy in TWELFTH NIGHT too, as there must have been for any settler who walked out of their log cabin some spring circa 1700 to find their garden growing at last, or came home one Christmas night to find a long-lost friend waiting at their fire with tales of places inconceivable. I think the human heart, still a formidable frontier itself (and Shakespeare sets his play on a strange coast because he's going to tell us about the strangest parts of our desires), must have been so alive in those days when the woods were still endless, the seas virtually impassable and entertainment restricted to camp songs and heavy drinking. Laughter, often in the face of pain and loss, must have felt so truly medicinal, just as the sun is warmest in those last October days before the frost coats the pumpkins and the nights become long and filled with ghosts. As the fool's final song tells us, the rain is as inevitable to life as aging, failure and hangovers. But then doesn't that make these moments when we sing about it all the more precious and beautiful? Isn't have the fun of drinking knowing you're going to pay for it later so you really do have to enjoy it while you can? If youth is something that will not endure, it probably tastes all the sweeter for that. Embracing the moment is a lesson we need to learn in modern times but something I suspect only real fools didn't comprehend back in such harsh times and places. But that's the trick of TWELFTH NIGHT: everyone is a fool in Ilyria. Well, almost everyone.

What you will. I'm sure I will convince nobody this play isn't a comedy and I hope you laugh enough as you watch it to doubt me. Everything in this story is something we need to laugh at so we don't cry about it. But I'm warning you, this play is full of teeth. This play has jaws that will cleave you straight to the heart. And it runs faster than you do.

BOAX

2011-03-23T10:04:00.000-07:00

So, it's BOA time again, or rather has been for two weeks now, and I have a little play called "Speak Roughly" in the festival this year, excellently directed by Kate Jopson. Tonight I get to see the show for the third time (it's actually like its eighth performance but I have been really busy) and do a talk back with the audience. In honor of that, I'm reproducing an interview I did with the festival dramaturge, Ignacio Zulueta. Many thanks, once again and as always, to the amazing Jessica Holt who organized this year's festival and without whom "Speak Roughly" would never have happened.

IGGY: What’s your working relationship with director Kate Jopson of Woman’s Will? How does your collaboration for BOA X compare to your normal playwriting and production process?

STUART: I only met Kate Jopson, at a completely unconnected event at Theater Pub, about a week before I found out she was directing my show for BOA. I had seen her in a Threshold show, but didn't even know she was a director. Woman's Will was started by an alum from my college, Reed, but that's really my only connection to them and I confess I've only seen two of their productions. As far as how this process is different... for me, it's not really. Kate and I met for coffee and she gave me some feedback and asked some questions about why I had made some of the choices I made when building my story and characters. I made two small cuts at her suggestion and put a couple of ideas in her head to mull over after getting a sense of what drew her to the piece and what her take on it would be. As a writer who is also a director, I know how important it is for a director to be given space and freedom to make their own artistic voice heard in a production. You want them to get the piece and you want it respected and well-interpreted, but I believe that if you're going to collaborate you really collaborate and that means, at some point, letting go of the piece as a writer so it can live as a play. Kate and I have communicated a few times over e-mail as she's made her choices about casting and I suspect we'll keep communicating throughout the process but I'm really letting this be her show. I did the same with Claire last year- I only came to two rehearsals- and it worked out brilliantly. It's an exciting moment on opening night to be re-introduced to your own piece.

IGGY: Short plays are the rage nationally – what opportunities will become available to you as a result of producing SPEAK ROUGHLY at BOA?

STUART: BOA itself is an opportunity. And yes, short plays are currently in vogue. I suppose if you're asking what my plans are for SPEAK ROUGHLY after BOA it's pretty much going to depend on whether I feel the show works or not. If it does, I have some ideas of where I'd like to take it next, including making it part of an evening of similarly themed shows, but like all plays I hope it has a life of its own and that other people/companies want to do it. I guess, my answer, is "we'll just have to wait and see, won't we?"

IGGY: I recall seeing your play about the disobedient piano last year. How many Bay One Acts have you participated in previously? Who directed and produced, and what has become of the piano scripts and others?

STUART: HOUSEBROKEN was my first time having work performed at BOA. It was directed by Claire Rice, who I designated as No Nude Men's representative at BOA when we decided to be a producing partner last year. Claire was actually offered a number of scripts but she ended up choosing mine because she really liked it and it called to her the strongest out of what she was given. I was actually mildly embarrassed at the time because I felt like it would look like we'd "arranged" the whole thing but when I saw what she did with it and my excellent cast I was so happy it had happened. Since then I have shown the script to a couple of people. There is always talking of turning it into a short film, but it never seems to happen, partly because I'm so busy with other projects that it's hard find time to really push that one. But I'd like to see something done with it. Other than HOUSEBROKEN I was actually in BOA as an actor in 2005. I was in FUTURE OF THE FEMALE, which was directed by Scott McMorrow. That was actually one of the best acting experiences I've ever had in San Francisco. Scott's a good director.

IGGY: BOA X the premiere of this production? What does that mean for SPEAK ROUGHLY in particular and your corpus of work as a writer?

STUART: BOA X will be the first time SPEAK ROUGHLY is performed, outside of a reading context. To me, that means this is the test drive to see if it actually works, or needs more work. As a writer, this marks my 35th time being fully produced. Or 33rd if we don't count the films.

IGGY: Fans of Lewis Caroll, and viewers of the Tim Burton film, will find your cast of characters quite familiar. What’s it like reimagining canonical characters from Victorian children’s literature into a contemporary meditation on intimacy and abandonment?

STUART: Actually, Caroll fans will probably be displeased with my take on his characters- but since I'm not really a Caroll fan, I kind of shrug and say "oh well" to that. I tried to capture the mood and style of Caroll's Wonderland with the patterns of the dialogue and the way the story reveals itself, but the characters probably have more in line with the Burton film, which I see as a fantasy film- and a fairly good one- while Carroll's book is really more absurdism/da-da. The play is largely inspired by having played the frog footman all summer in a production of ALICE IN WONDERLAND, watching Geoffrey Nolan and Karen Offereins as the Duchess and Cook, respectively, and becoming so familiar with the Duchess scene that I couldn't resist the temptation to explore it, especially after Geoff said to me one day, "You know, I don't think this is her first pig baby." I've done a lot of adaptation work over the years and I've really come to understand that you have to make every adaptation your own. One way to do that is to follow those elements of the material that most appeal to you, down a rabbit hole (if you will) to some new place the previous author hadn't gone. For me, the gothic elements of the duchess scene- its frightening pig babies, the violence of the cook, the frog-headed servants, the house in the woods, the dangerous and omniscient cat- were the most intriguing and I built the world of the play out of that. I sort of revamped things so that the Duchess is the new Alice- the part that doesn't fit in to the askew logic of the whole- and thus she really isn't at all the way Caroll envisioned her. Or the way Geoff played her, though I couldn't have written this play without his performance. Interestingly enough, I wrote this play as a birthday present for Karen, who is a big Carroll fan.

IGGY: In three words, not including Lewis Caroll: who or what influenced you during the creation of this play, or inspired you to write it in the first place?

STUART: Geoff. Karen. Despair.

IGGY: In two words: what unforeseen change or collaboration is taking place in your show?

STUART: Sexual Tectonics.

IGGY: Why is a raven like a writing desk, anyway?

STUART: Because Poe wrote on both.

SALON

2011-02-09T17:35:00.001-08:00

So, Nicole Gluckstern just published an article today about Theater Salons and performing in people's homes instead of traditional public performances spaces or theaters. It's a really good article (http://www.sfbg.com/pixel_vision/2011/02/09/performant-homing-instinct) and not just because she mentions my own theater company's little living room salons that we've been doing since October of 209.

We get about two lines of the article (and that's about what we deserve) but Nicole and I had exchanged a number of e-mails. Below you can read some of what I told her about what No Nude Men has been up to over the last few years:

Attendance at a NNM salon really varies depending on the time of year and the play chosen. At our first one, which was in October 2009, we read Clive Barker's COLOSSOS and Sherezeda Kent screened her short zombie film- we had probably 40 people at that (I have, thankfully, a massive living room). Since then we've done ten salons, with out next happening on Tuesday, actually (we're readig Synge's PLAYBOY OF THE WESTERN WORLD) and attendance has ranged from 10 (PERICLES) to 30 (BECKET). Usually it's in the 15-25 range. So far we haven't had to turn any one away- or deny participation on some level to whoever is there.

When we started our salon the objective was to broaden everyone's reading list. We're theater people, so in the end, theater and acting are the forms which interest us the most, though we have read a short story together and there are occasional short films thrown in if they tie in with the play of the evening. We're essentially a book club, but the book is read right there and then with, as one actress once said, "Everyone having to make their choices in that moment." But since everyone is reading along in their own script, everyone can see how they might have done it differently, or the reader may have gotten it wrong. Most importantly, it allows us all to closely watch how an author is laying out their story dramatically. After the reading we usually talk pretty extensively about the play as a group- some plays obviously inspire more disucssion than others. In the end, we started this group to be better actors, writers and directors, looking to the established cannon for what it does right- and what it does wrong.

We also established this salon as a way to interact with each other socially and network, etc. The best thing about a living room performance is there is no audience there to judge YOU- we're all there to have fun, and maybe judge the work we read, but the atmosphere is very supportive and egalitarian. The equity actors hang out with the non-equity actors. The directors and producers of rival theater companies can drop their bullshit and just enjoy one another company. Both before and after the salon there is a lot of shop talk but it's in the fun, comparing notes way, not the borderline aggressive pissing match way. Best of all- the writers who attend can talk openly about another writer's work- without worrying about offending anyone in the room because none of us have written the play in question.

The most challenging thing is finding pieces that have a broad enough scope to let everyone participate. Also, finding people to host, who have a place to host. This can be tough. Theater people are always busy, and most of us can't afford to live without roomates. Luckily, I have one who is pretty tolerant of these things but I also try not to abuse that good relationship.

And yes, I do think more theater companies should cultivate the local scene in ways that are fun and informal- whether that's with a salon, or a drinks night, or a living chess game- which we tried to do once, by the way, and it bombed. Practically no one showed up. All a salon is, is a gathering where people of a discursive and intellectual nature can share ideas, argue and appreciate or depricate something together- but no matter how you look at it, it's a celebration. Artists could use more celebrations, especially ones that bring them together with other artists. I've been in this city for almost a decade and while I love the scene here I also get very frustrated sometimes at how it can just be a bunch of warring fifedoms. And warring over what? We're all in this together and we're all in this because we love it. Even at the top in theater you rarely make a ton of money- most the theater professionals I know have more than one source of income- so while money is important and fame and prestige are nice, in the end, if you're not in this field- or any art- because you love it and you believe in it then I sort of question everything else about you and everything you do. The salons were actually first started in 2006 by one of our long-time company members Cassie Powell and when she started them she called it "Obsessed with a Fairy Tale" because that's kind of what every artist is: obsessed with the fairy tale that not only will you make something magic, but that anyone else will give a shit. Finding ways to unite us in that struggle, no matter what our differences, is pretty essential to keeping art and it's most important byproduct- intellectual and spiritual exploration- alive.

HERMES

2011-01-26T11:45:00.000-08:00

No Nude Men Productions and director Tore Ingersoll-Thorp are collaborating together for the world premiere of Bennett Fisher's new play about four derivative traders seeking to benefit from the Greek financial meltdown. Their acts of greed and deceit bring unforeseeable consequences and an unexpected visitor: Hermes, god of commerce and thieves, the physical manifestation of fraud, who goads the group into bolder action with slippery logic, tantalizing visions of immense wealth, and the occasional punch in the balls.

Inspired in part by the Lehman Brothers' role in the current Greek economic collapse, HERMES paints an impishly comic and glorifying portrait of equivocation, exploitation, disinformation, misappropriation, deregulation, ruination, large corporations, financial machinations, and the age of globalization while exploring man's godlike ability to profit off what is truly worthless. It also marks the first full production of a show premiered in last year's San Francisco Olympians Festival.

Starring Juliana Egley, Geoffrey Nolan, Carl Lucania, Brian Markley, Lauren Spencer and Brian Tryborn.

The play runs Thursday, Friday and Saturdays from March 3rd to the 26th, 8 PM curtain, at the Exit Stage Left (156 Eddy Street) in San Francisco.

Tickets range from $12.00-$25.00 and are available on Brown Paper Tickets: http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/144160

Reservations strongly encouraged.

For press/industry comps e-mail sfolympians@gmail.com.

AWARDS

2010-12-31T14:42:00.001-08:00

So, I recently decided that I wanted to start my own Bay Area Theater Awards, because I figure my opinions are just as legitimate as anyone else's, the awards I give out just as valuable as any other critical awards, (recipients of the SEBATA, or the Stuey, if you would prefer, get nothing but my admiration and some free publicity) and also because there's a fairly good chance that I've seen a lot of theater the usual award givers haven't seen, especially as half the plays I notice winning local awards are shows I've somehow missed (frankly, amazing as I see probably 100 shows a year, on all levels of stages and from a myriad of companies and artists- but that's what I love about the Bay Area- so many shows to pick from!). Furthermore, there are some people who think I don't like anything and I feel a need to not only prove them wrong, but to do so by expressing how much of the local color I do love and admire, as opposed to just pointing out that the reason they think I don't like anything is because I generally don't like *their* work (oh... I guess I did just point that out, didn't I?). Anyway, because I am a product of the generation that grew up with the MTV Movie Awards- and, because I'm the only person on the voting committee and thus can do what I like- I have decided that my categories are purely arbitrary and can be stretched to allow me to write about anyone I feel like. The two limits are 1) I can't give myself an award (though I can have been involved in the show on a limited level) and 2) I won't go over twelve (though there may be ties for some awards). Because seriously, how (more) self indulgent would either of those things be? Oh, 3) I won't give out awards for how bad something was. There's just no point in that, and I'm here to be positive. Plus, those people were punished enough. Oh, so you may notice that a lot of these awards are going out to people I know... yeah, that's how all awards work, so deal with it. At least I'm honest about it. Also, I see *a lot* of theater by people I know because I know *a lot* of people.

To all my friends and frenemies in the Bay Area Theater Scene... it's been a great year. Let's you and me do it again sometime. Well... most of you. ;)

BEST ORIGINAL SCRIPT
"All-Skate" by Kim Millie Luke (Wily West Productions)
So, this was part of a theater festival I had a piece in (Wily Wests' "SF Stories") along with several other formidable writing talents: Kirk Shimano, Morgan Ludlow, Evelyn Jean Pine. I remember going to the first group reading and hearing each piece for the first time and having that general sense of, "Oh, yes, these are good pieces and I'll enjoy this evening". Then we got to Kim's piece and as we read through it I was struck by that feeling which is the greatest compliment any writer can give another: deep, insane envy. Kim's piece was everything I wanted mine to be: funny, without being precious, poignant without being schmaltzy, and true true true. She captured beautifully a middle-aged couple playing a sexual version of "Keeping up with the Joneses" and it was both very California and very universal at the same time. Her characters were by turns likable and off-putting while always remaining essentially relatable- I knew these people, I had been these people, I could turn into these people at any point- and I was both uncomfortable and completely engrossed by the tale she presented one comic page after another. Due to the nature of the festival, she had to cut down the script, so it has sadly not been performed in full for the public, but it could be. It could even be expanded into a full length. This is a damn good script, Kim. Don't let it die.

BEST THEATER FESTIVAL
BOA Festival 9 (Three Wise Monkeys Theater Company)
Yeah, I was in this festival but you know what? I'm in a lot of them, and this was my favorite. Not just because the work in it was largely pretty good, but because it actually did what any theater festival should do: it brought people together, it broke down walls between companies and it made people think about why we do this and how. In the end, this is really an administration award, but the admin side of theater is so often over-looked that I think it's almost MORE IMPORTANT to recognize when someone has done something simply amazing- namely co-ordinate a wagon-load of talented egotists and whip them into some kind of presentable shape and GET THEM TO LIKE IT AND BE GRATEFUL on top of that. Claire Zawa, Jessica Holt, dearly departed Richard Bernier and a host of other people I probably never met in this process because there were so many lending a hand not only put together a bang-up festival, they rescued BOA from the sidelines and made it one of the coolest things I have been a part of since I moved here in 2002. If this festival doesn't become the PREMIERE THEATER FESTIVAL of the Bay Area there is really no justice because at ten years old it's not only time, but how these things should work: seed planted, seed grown, growth tended, growth changed, growth cut back courageously and re-grown, thicker, stronger and more beautiful than ever before. That said, there was some really good work in this festival too, the personal standouts for me being Lauren Yee's Life and Death of Joshua Zweig, which was beautifully directed by Tore Ingersoll Thorpe with a heartbreaking performance by Ariane Owens at the center; Tim Bauer's Three Little Words was endlessly entertaining as directed by Alex Curtis, acted by a rock solid quartet of actors working at break-neck speed (Jasen Talise, Dave Dyson, Megan Briggs, and Nick Dickson); and Sam Leichter made a surprisingly arch and meticulous writing debut with The Philadelphian. For the record, my own piece, Housebroken, was pretty good too, thanks to Claire Rice's clean/tight direction and my excellent cast: Ryan Hayes, Kirsten Broadbear, Julia Heitner and Andy Strong. But seriously, there was so much good stuff in the festival I could write volumes on it. Suffice it to say, if you missed it, that's a shame. Good thing there's another one just around the corner.

BEST OVERALL PRODUCTION
"Agnes The Barbarian" by The Thunderbird Theater Company
So, I've been seeing Thunderbird shows for almost a decade now and this is probably the best offering of theirs I've ever seen- even displacing "Severed By Expiration 2", which previously held the crown in my assessment of their canon. Like that show, something about this one just worked on every level: no weak link in the cast (and some really excellent performances at the core, particularly from author Jason Harding, title character Jaime Lee Currier and Dana Goldberg and Dan Kurtz as a pair of scheming toadies); the sets and costumes had an appropriately chintzy look that seemed chosen and well thought out instead of the result of a low budget; the pacing was nice, the humor constant and the well written script balanced just enough content in with its zany to keep me genuinely interested instead of just waiting for the next joke. The true credit probably goes to director Shay Casey, who kept his production tight and clean- my favorite kind of show, when it comes down to it. And it doesn't hurt that, as a LORD OF THE RINGS geek, I've been waiting for a "I've been cheating on you with Sauruman" joke for years.

BEST READING
"Hermes" written and directed by Bennett Fisher
I went to a lot of readings in 2010. I hosted a lot of readings in 2010. But you know what? I'm only producing one play I saw read in 2010, and it's this play. Why? Because this reading rocked. Because more than any other show in the Olympians Festival, Ben's most acutely nailed the central conceit of the event: finding a way to not just revamp a Greek legend or god, but to show how their power and influence is still with us today, not just as context but relevance, or in the case of this script, direct, muscular interference with the way we live now. His allegorical fable about rouge traders riding a market as unstable as the classical god of chance, trickery, travel, merchants, money and thieves was both timely and political while still being funny and human and his top notch cast- Sam Liechter, Lauren Spencer, Cat Lardas, Carl Lucania, Juliana Egley and Charles Lewis III- sold the script with everything they had.

BEST SHORT PLAY
"Inner Dialogue" written by Kirk Shimano for Piano Fight Productions.
How do you have a perfect short play? Take one really good script by Kirk Shimano and combine it with two performers, Rob Ready and Dan Williams, who have a ton of energy, excellent comic timing and chemistry so palpable that their oddball gay romance (beautifully played by two straight men) became universally charming and audience electrifying. This piece managed to be piss-in-your-pants funny and then it kicked you in your wet crotch with the final page. You didn't have to be gay to get what it was all about- the way we judge the shit out of people we don't know and how we shoot ourselves in the foot of ever actually connecting with another human being- but if you were gay there was something really amazing about seeing someone vocalize, so effectively, an element of gay life that was neither about martyrdom or victimization or rah rah rah. The fact that it was put on by a company that, by their own admission, may best be known for throwing beer at the audience made this piece even more astoundingly poignant and courageous.

BEST AMBITIOUS THEATER PIECE
"Terroristika" by Threshold Theater
I saw the last preview of this show and heard some major changes were made shortly afterwards, but I still appreciate everything that director Jessica Holt was attempting to do here with a new script that tried to balance the human elements of the hot political topic of suicide bombers. Sarah Rose Butler gave a fine, complex performance that combined the right levels of genuine innocence and willful ignorance and the artier elements of the production- stylized movement and dialogue- helped reign the potential melodrama in enough to keep the content palatable rather than preachy. It seems like most of the "issue" theater I see in San Francisco is pretty much tubthumping of one kind or another so it was nice to see something so "big topic" driven be more exploratory than pedagogical, and I admired what the show was trying to do even if it didn't always pull it off (and it mostly did). Most importantly (and again, somewhat rare in the Bay Area) there was obviously a great deal of heart and sincerity in the show, which made it feel actually important and significant rather than just "a very special episode."

BEST FIRST ACT
What did "Akin" by Ripe Theater and "...And Jesus Moonwalks the Mississippi" by Cutting Ball Theater Company have in common? They both had excellent casts and wonderful production values, and also both had great first acts that, at least for me, never quite topped themselves. In the case of "Akin" (by Noah Kelly and Sarah McKereghan) this was because the show was conceptual over narrative- the second act is merely the first act, in reverse order, showing the same characters engaged in the same moment of their lives but how those moments would be if certain choices had been made differently. This was, admittedly, interesting but since I was actually REALLY engaged by the first act and the characters as they were presented there, I was actually a bit annoyed to not continue with the stories I started with. I wanted to know what happened to these people as they were more compelling than the concept, which was a bit too "stole it from SLIDING DOORS" for me to not feel like I'd seen it done before. But in the end this is just quibbling, because the show was really good and I suppose there is some merit to "Leave them wanting more." I just don't want that sensation all through the second act. "Jesus" on the other hand suffered from a second act that just fell apart, progressively, with every scene, until by the end I could no longer really follow the people or the story or the point of why I was watching what I was watching. But I later heard this was probably the result of a LOT of revisions going on almost every night of the process, with the second act still really being in development. As someone who was cutting his own epic stageplay's second act by a page or two every night for the first ten performances of the run I can relate to this so in the end, this really isn't a criticism so much as a hope to one day see more and be more satisfied.

BEST PERFORMANCE BY AN ACTOR
Without trying to turn this into "a gay thing", I will say a lot of my favorite performances of the last year almost all involve gay male characters (Paul Rodrigues, Kai Morrison, Dan Williams, Rob Ready- you know who you played). Ryan Hayes in "Boys Together Clinging: the Gay Poetry of Walt Whitman", however, did something I consider largely impossible- namely he put on a one man show that didn't bore the crap out of me and the fact that he did this with a bunch of Whitman Poems...I mean, it was kind of miraculous. But Ryan executed his show with a sophistication and fluency that I know, I personally, have only achieved once or twice in my life as an actor and the fact that he was able to do it at an intersection in the Castro while trains and cars and random naked people did their best to distract his wrap audience... seriously, my hat is off to you sir. You are an inspiration and the king of your craft.

BEST PERFORMANCE BY AN ACTRESS
Celeste Van Etten and Michelle Jasso in "Hera". Okay, I wrote the script, which I happen to think is a good one, but since I didn't direct this reading (and yes, readings count for performances) I had no idea how amazing my cast was until I saw them at the show. I had good people from top to bottom, and I have seen sooooo many good women perform this year (quick shout outs to Ariane Owens, Kira Shaw, Megan Briggs, Kirsten Broadbear, Caitlyn Louchard, Jessica Rudholm and a million other ladies I don't have room to list here) but the chemistry and power these two women demonstrated on stage in my little drawing room drama was out of control. Director Claire Rice shares part of this praise, of course, but what it comes down to is when an actress can make you forget she's holding the script a reading really becomes a show and since 75% of my script is these two women sparring the fact that both of them nailed every moment EFFORTLESSLY left me feeling like I'd just been a fly on the wall of one of best family meltdowns ever. Celeste was sharp and deadly in her performance; Michelle majestic and pathetic at the same time. I was deeply honored and just wish I could see it again and again.

BEST FUSION THEATER PIECE
"Caligari" by Hurly Burly Productions
It is not a secret I strongly dislike performance art. 90% of it (and I have statistics to prove that!) is self-indulgent laziness made by people who try to distract from their mediocrity of vision by making things so "outrageous" or "obtuse" that you have no choice but pretend to "get it" for fear of being called square. Honestly, I tend to feel this way about most dance theater too, as it seems to be mostly be done by people who can't dance or act and most importantly either don't care to tell a story or (and this is what its usually revealed to be) just don't know how to tell one. Hurly Burly's "Caligari" skates a fine line between performance art and theater but miraculously it managed to strike the balance perfectly for me, with the storyline emerging in a way that felt enigmatic rather than non-existent and content that felt sufficiently explored in a piece that was, wisely, only fifty minutes. The performances were all perfectly pitched to the stylization of the piece, with each two-dimension character getting expressly the right amount of stage time and development, enough to make them archetypes and not enough to make you start asking why they weren't developed more. The twist at the end wasn't a twist so much as a re-enforcer that it's the little things that usually break us in the end, but since I wasn't there for plot twists it worked for me. Rik Lopes and Mikka Bonel's direction, Daniel Korth's script, Amanda Ortmayer's really incredible lighting all brought the piece together stylistically to create a nightmare world you could sink into without also feeling a burning desire to escape- truly commendable, as lesser artists would have just made the fifty minutes repulsive or so irritating and chaotic you'd just want it to end (something they'd also assume meant they had "succeeded", as if the goal of any performance should ever be to chase its audience away). Like most fusion pieces I'm not entirely sure if I could see this going on to a life of its own in the repetoire, but I'm very happy to have seen it and I applaud the experiment and its overall success.

BEST MUSICAL
"Gutenberg the Musical" by Scott Brown and Anthony King (Beards! Beards! Beards!)
Have you ever seen a show that just made you want to hug everybody involved? This was that show for me. I am not someone who tends to give much away while watching plays, being more inclined to have a thoughtful look on my face, even when I love something (actually, when I hate something, I shift around a lot, like a child; when I really hate it, I have small seizures and usually start putting my coat on about twenty minutes before something should end); that said, I had a smile on my face from one minute in until the end of the play and I full on "who-hoo'ed" during curtain call. This is my favorite thing I have yet to see come out of Beards! Beards! Beards! and Joey Price really is someone whose unique vision I will miss when he decides to abandon us here in the Bay. Both the performances in this essentially two man musical were brilliantly funny and just a tiny bit desperate- which was perfect for the story of two guys trying to get a terrible musical launched. You wanted to throw money at them even as you were laughing at them and not just suffer fools gladly but have them over for dinner and hope they wanted to be your friend. Additionally, surprisingly catchy songs and funny, funny lyrics.

BEST SITE SPECIFIC SHOW
"Hamlet on Alcatraz" directed by Ava Roy
I had the chance to meet and interview Ava for the Commonwealth Club before seeing her show, my original performance of which was rained out. Luckily, I was able to make another performance and despite four hours of walking/standing in the sweltering heat and brilliant sunshine of the San Francisco late autumn (locals know what I mean), and despite also being a Shakespeare buff and critic, I have to say the magic of this production was pretty undeniable. Ava took advantage of ALL of Alcatraz to tell her story, literally dragging her audience from one side of the island to the other and taking them through pretty much every nook and cranny she could along the way. What was really startling was that she found a million ways to retain momentum and continuity, no easy task when you move an audience three times let along two dozen and no easy task when you do HAMLET period. Ava's show was not just good site specific theater, however, but also good Shakespeare, with a strong cast and just enough well-chosen design elements in the costumes and props to accentuate Alcatraz's already iconic and imposing backdrop. The epitome of the kind of thing "you can only see in San Francisco", this show will probably go down in legend and deservedly so. It's the apex of what makes this place worth being in and people like Ava are the kind of people I point to whenever my more famous friends say, "Why aren't you in New York?"

CHRISTMAS

2010-11-18T13:39:00.000-08:00

So, looking around, (and starting with my own schedule), I notice that there are a whole lot of Christmas shows this year- or maybe it's just that this year there are more small theater companies in San Francisco than ever, and all of them are doing something to honor (or crap on) the holidays. You have your usual ACT "Christmas Carol" stuff, your various "Nutcrackers" from SF Ballet down to your assorted East Bay dance companies (and if you've never seen the "Hard Nut" at Mark Morris Dance I heartily, heartily recommend it) and your plethora of "Snarky Snarky We're Too Cool To Like Christmas" shows by the latest and greatest writer hoodlums to hit the Bay Area theater scene (which reminds me, Theater Pub Christmas- "Code Red"- will be on December 20th; save the date- we have presents to give away and everything!). And just in case you don't want to see a Holiday show but still want to go to the theater there are plenty of other local options- Hurly Burly's "Caligari" (www.jointhehurlyburly.org) and Climate Theater's "The Man of Rock" (http://www.manofrock.com/), to name the two I'll be seeing.

But let's say you do want a Christmas experience that isn't the same old Clara and the Rat King shuffle, or Tiny Tim Teaches the True Meaning of Christmas extravaganza, yet also strives to achieve a bit of an emotional catharsis beyond the hipster posturings of why the holidays suck and misanthropy rules. Is there anything out there for you? For a long time, the needs above being my own needs, I thought that the answer was "no" and I had to content myself with re-watching "Go!" (which I maintain is the best Christmas movie ever). Then last year around this time I went to a friend's play reading and was surprised to find that not only was there a play being developed that made me laugh and moved me deeply (my favorite combination), but did so in a way both distinctly American and un-apologetically via a Christmas aesthetic that walked a tight-rope of after-school special sentimentalism and absurdist black comedy.

I throw in the American bit because I've noticed that many of us in the cultural and intellectual "elite" of San Francisco often seem to have this kind of disdain for the rest of the country (by which we mean the Midwest) in addition to a disdain for Christmas- in many ways the apex of Midwestern culture and values (Christ, consumerism, being nice to one another just because you're supposed to). I feel like a lot of plays in San Francisco (and I do not discount my own from this assessment) tend to be about San Francisco, or take place in California, or Europe, or basically anywhere but, say, the Midwest. If we do depict the midwest we usually do so in disparaging terms- it's that place we escaped from, it's the place coming to stop our gay marriages, it's the wasteland we have to cross to get to New York/Italy/Narnia and THERE BE DRAGONS THERE. We're more likely, it seems, to set our tales in fictional realms or distant planets than depict our neighbors in a sympathetic light. Not all of us, of course, but most of us. And again, I include me (I have never written anything that takes place in the mid-west; the southwest, yes, but that's a different animal entirely) and I'm not saying we should or shouldn't write about the mid-west, I'm just saying it was one of the first things that struck me about this play: a Christmas story set in Oaklahoma. An un-ironic Christmas story set in Oaklahoma. An un-ironic Christmas story focused on a woman dying of cancer- in Oaklahoma- who goes on a road trip with a recovering junkie trying to escaping a loving but oppressive family of musical geniuses. If you had told me about it at a dinner party, I would have asked you why you were watching Lifetime when there's so much good internet porn to download.

But I wasn't being my witty, drunk socialite self at the time (that came later, at the White Horse, when I charmed the author into letting me attach my name to his play as its future director); I was sitting in a theater, watching my friend perform the role that two weeks from tonight (December 2) he will be creating again on opening night, finding myself moving from bemused and skeptical to interested and invested, to hooked and ultimately, deeply, deeply touched and satisfied. Maybe because I have a father who died slowly for several years before finally leaving us a few days before Thanksgiving; maybe because I have a brother who struggled with a heroin addiction; maybe because even the most absurd things these people did struck me as totally believable because they were the kind of absurd things people do when they are faced with situations they never thought they'd have to face, and thus I related to them and felt like I'd spent many a Christmas in much the same way with similar people. Like with any truly good piece of theater, I ended up feeling that this story, which wasn't my story, became my story by the end. These people- maudlin, ridiculous, sarcastic, angry, scared, desperate, forgiving, hopeful, romantic- were people I knew already, people I'd been, people I could see myself becoming. It was written in this lean, economical style, scathingly funny but unafraid of its softer side, brittle as winter wind, soothing as a snow-covered landscape, delicate and sharp like an icicle. It whispered the possibility of miracle even as it present death. The whole thing shouldn't have worked and yet it did, somehow, without ever straying too far into schmaltz or bitterness. I was genuinely impressed, to the point where I got off my own high horse and asked to be a part of something I had no real claim on. And that's how Morgan Ludlow taught me the true meaning of Christmas.

I can't promise the same thing will happen to you. I have been in theater long enough to know we are all drawn to what we are drawn to for different reasons, that no one thing is ever perceived the exact same way twice, and that there is ultimately no accounting for taste- especially bad taste. But I can say that a month ago, when those of us slated to work on this show were told it might not happen- in fact, would not happen- all of us rallied to save it, finding money, finding time, finding energy- rather than just let go of our chance to tell this story. I can say that in the time since then we have been working determinedly at crafting something we all know we love for our own reasons, with people we're delighted to work with and surprised by, including a writer who continues to hone and sharpen his little Yule-tide epic as the cast grows and shapes these characters for their world debut. I can say, for better or worse, to your liking or otherwise, you will not see another Christmas play like this in San Francisco this season, and maybe not for a very long time or ever again. Productions, like snowflakes, are unique no matter how much they look alike at first glance. If you're looking for snowflakes this season, I hope you'll consider including ours in your collection.***

WILY WEST PRODUCTIONS PRESENTS

RUTH AND THE SEA

written by Morgan Ludlow

Laylah Muran, Executive Producer

Linda Wang, Associate Producer

Christopher Struett, Associate Producer

Directed by STUART BOUSEL

Sets & Lighting by QUINN J. WHITAKER

Stage Manager AMY LIZARDO RYAN

Costumes by KIRA SHAW

Featuring: GWYNETH RICHARDS, TOM DARTER, RYAN HAYES, MICHELLE JASSO, KIRA SHAW, and LINDA WANG

DECEMBER 2-18

THURSDAY/ FRIDAY/ SATURDAY

8:00pm

Ticketing Info here: http://ruthandthesea.com/index.html

STAGE WERX

533 Sutter Street

San Francisco

****And on a different note, I'll also be seeing this this Christmas:

Guerilla Rep & Beards Beards Beards’

Jonny & La'ree Oddman's Christwanzaakuh Spectacular

a Joey Price/John Caldon collaboration I can only imagine will be amazing.

December 2-1, at the Exit

www.beardsbeardsbeards.com

OLYMPIANS

2010-06-23T16:35:00.000-07:00

The San Francisco Olympians Festival
Like a Pandora's box of plays, leaving all who attend with hope for independent theatre.

In the month of July in 2010, No Nude Men Productions, one of San Francisco’s longest running indy theater troupes, will roll out twelve new full-length plays written by fourteen local writers, each one focusing on one of the twelve Olympian gods of Ancient Greece.

Generated over the course of a year (writers were picked from a larger pool of applicants in September of 2009), the plays range from wild comedies to elegant period pieces, terrifying horror stories to contemporary satires, romantic dramas to political commentaries. The one great unifier will be the goddess Hestia, the twelfth Olympian who gave up her throne to the young god Dionysus when he came to Olympus seeking his place amongst his peers. A vital figure of Greek culture (she was the goddess of fire, the hearth and home), there is little mythology focused around Hestia until now, when she will step to the front of the line as the patron goddess of the Festival, and a supporting character in each of the twelve plays.
Every one of the twelve Olympians will get their own night, during which the play dedicated to them will be given a staged and rehearsed reading at the Exit Stage Left by some of the best and brightest of the San Francisco acting scene. Additionally, the theater itself will contain an ongoing exhibit of twelve original, themed art pieces being generated for the show’s publicity by twelve local artists. Additional mythology themed displays and a chance to winning a prize or two will complete each evening.

Truly a unique event, the festival will be a reminder of the still potent vitality of Greek mythology and its continued significance not only as cultural roots, but as cultural mirror as well.

The plays, dates and authors:

DIONYSUS by Nathan Tucker, July 8th
An esoteric mystery cult in San Francisco invokes the godhead of an ancient deity, manifesting his presence and unleashing the Wrath of Dionysus

APOLLO by Garret Groenveld, July 9th
Apollo's Gift - that of foresight - was given to Cassandra out of love and proves the undoing of their chances.

POSEIDON by Bryce Allemann, Dana Constance and Kathy Hicks, July 10
Fish speak because they have something to say; Gods because they have to say something.

HERMES by Ben Fisher, July 15
The sudden death of a key negotiator and the influence forces both mundane and divine throw a San Francisco financial corporation into disarray.

ARTEMIS by M.R. Fall, July 16
By escaping to the beach, Artemis thought she would outrun the clouds of dread building inside her; little did she know a storm was waiting for her along the shore…

ZEUS by Helen Noakes, July 17
If Zeus is your daddy does it make you a delightful delusional, a delicious demigod, or just plain fabulous? Zeus Story tells all!

DEMETER by Claire Ann Rice, July 22
Anyone who knew the rituals have paid the ferryman for passage elsewhere and all that is left are Goddesses without believers, prayers without answers, and mothers without children.

APHRODITE by Nirmala Nataraj, July 23
In this dark comedy about the lengths women will go to for love and acceptance, a washed-out infomercial star confronts her demons through dating mishaps, plastic surgery, and mysterious visitations from the paragon of feminine allure—Aphrodite herself.

ARES by Sean Kelly, July 24
Bill is due to ship out on a Third-World peace-keeping mission when he accidentally makes a sacrifice to Ares, God of Bloodlust. Together they turn a basic military action into a violent quest for revenge.

ATHENA by Ashley Cowan, July 29
While trying to balance her rational intelligence and notions of romance, Athena finds herself in a personal exploration fueled by the timeless question: can only fools fall in love or can it also exist among reason and logic?

HERA by Stuart Bousel, July 30
A Victorian-Era parlor drama about the perfect wife and mother, and the secrets which threaten to destroy her extensively engineered domestic bliss.

HEPHAESTUS by Evelyn Jean Pine, July 31
The world of Hephaestus, god of fire and volcanoes, erupts when his creations -- three gorgeous, golden robots -- revolt.

All readings will occur at the Exit Stage Left in San Francisco (156 Eddy Street) at 8 PM. Admission: $10.00 per reading (if you attend 4, you get the 5th one free). Reservations are not necessary, but we recommend getting to the theater at 7:30 to ensure good seating.

GB

2010-04-13T16:05:00.000-07:00

GIANT BONES

A new play by Stuart Bousel, adapted from stories by Peter S. Beagle

WORLD PREMIERE RUN — SAN FRANCISCO, May 7 through June 19, 2010 at the Exit Theater (156 Eddy Street)

In 1993 Peter S. Beagle published his fourth fantasy novel, The Innkeeper’s Song. In 1997 he returned to the world of that novel with six new stories that were published in America under the title Giant Bones, and everywhere else in the world as The Magician of Karakosk. No one but Peter could have created these extraordinary tales of dangerous magic, absurd bravery, misdirected love, ardent deception, and secret truth...and now acclaimed Bay Area playwright Stuart Bousel has woven them together into a wonderful night of new dramatic theater.

There are only 1500 seats available through the entire run, so don’t hesitate. All shows in the series will likely be sold out before open night.

Please note: To celebrate this premiere event, all regular run attendees will receive a free signed hardcover copy of the new edition of The Magician of Karakosk. (This reissue will not be available for sale to the public until after the play ends its run in June.)

For more information on the production, call 650-728-8098.

SHOW DATES (all performances start at 8 PM)

Friday, May 7 — 1st Preview
Saturday, May 8 — 2nd Preview
Thursday, May 13 — 3rd Preview

Friday, May 14 — Opening Night
Saturday, May 15 — Gala Premiere and Party

Regular Run shows:

Thursday, May 20
Friday, May 21
Saturday, 22

Thursday, May 27
Friday, May 28
Saturday, 29

Thursday, June 3
Friday, June 4
Saturday, June 5

Thursday, June 10
Friday, June 11
Saturday, June 12

Thursday, June 17
Friday, June 18
Saturday, June 19 — Closing Night Special Event

BOA

2010-03-18T11:21:00.000-07:00

So, I never got around to promoting this year's Bay One Acts Festival on my blog (because in order to do that I would have to be the kind of person who regularly blogs, and I think we can all agree by now that I'm not that kind of person), but seeing as it is the first Thursday night since the festival went dark on the 13th, I wanted to take the time to say I couldn't be more happy with having been involved this past year.

BOA 9, as produced by Richard Bernier and helmed by Jessica Holt, was an amazing experience for me. I'd previously participated in BOA as an actor in THE FUTURE OF THE FEMALE, which was included in BOA 4, under the direction of Scott McMorrow, who I greatly enjoyed working with (the older I get, the shorter the list of people I will let direct me is), and the experience as a whole was a good one. I made friends with my cast-mates, and as a still relatively new member of the San Francisco theater community it was fun to be part of something not produced and directed by me that was competently handled and executed. I met some people like Karen Offereins, Hector Osario and Jessica Rudholm, themselves just starting out, who would go on to be major players in my theater life. I like the script I was in and I liked being a part of the show.

But what I didn't get out of that BOA which I did get out of this one- and which made this one such a great thing- was the sense of community that Jessica worked so very very hard to create between all of us involved in the festival this year. The fact that I was only a writer (my short play HOUSEBROKEN was included this year) and a co-producer meant that I was nowhere near as involved as my wonderful director (Claire Rice) and cast (Kirsten Broadbear, Ryan Hayes, Julia Heitner, Andy Strong) and yet even I walked out of the few rehearsals, group events and five performances (out of nine) that I attended with the sense that I had been more welcomed, appreciated and supported by the theater community of this city than I ever had in almost eight years of working here. I saw a great deal of work by writers I both knew and didn't know- most of it very good, some of it exceptional. I had long conversations with people I'd never met but only heard about- Rob Ready, Tore Ingersoll-Thorpe, Tim Bauer, Daniel Heath- and I got to know better people I only knew a little in passing- Meg Cohen, Meg O'Connor, Alex Curtis, Claire Zawa... this list is really pretty long. When it all came to a finish this last Sunday, I crashed the end of the strike because I just wanted a chance to say goodbye to everyone. It felt like the end of camp, or a good semester of college.

And that is, honestly, my favorite feeling in the world: the bittersweetness of those final moments with people you have been on a wonderful journey with. Jessica made a very stirring speech about why we do theater, especially on this level, and why it's so important. It echoed a lot of my own thoughts lately about "professional" theater vs. "small" theater and how by making that distinction it is usually implied that small theater is somehow less worthy. Of course, I have never believed that, being a proud champion of indy theater for many years, but I have often felt alone in that perspective, like most people I know are still rushing to get their equity card; rushing to get cast in bigger shows with bigger budgets regardless of if those shows are actually good or make the world a better place or have any artistic merit; rushing to "make it", which usually means- get paid and get famous, regardless of the cost. I have nothing against fame and I have nothing against getting paid- I want both too. But I want it for doing what I love, with people I love, the way that I love to do it.

I can't say for certain if anyone else in BOA this year feels the way I do about my own career and artistic ambition. To be honest, I know my ideas are not for everyone and that's okay, I don't mind. But I do think I can say with certainty that almost everyone involved this year did feel like they were part of something special and that no matter what their plans were after this festival or where they were hoping to go next, for a good four weeks there we all pushed that aside and just enjoyed being together, reminding ourselves that in the end this isn't about unions or budgets or ambition or fame or money, but that rarest of all things, the by-product of love and the soul when they are able to combine and run free in celebration: joy.

And I'm gonna miss that shit the same way I miss school and certain former lovers and certain productions I've been a part of and my youth.

VD

2010-02-06T08:40:00.001-08:00

San Francisco Theater Pub is back with their second offering: a celebration of romantic mis-adventure that's the perfect way to cut through the post-Valentine's miasma of mid-winter gloom!

With excellent new material by Stuart Bousel, Megan Cohen, Ashley Cowan, Ryan Hayes, Allison Herman, and songs by Molly Benson and Rana Weber, the evening will offer a myriad of perspectives- from the bitter to the sweet- on this thing we call "love" and the total throw-away holiday called "Valentine's Day" that seems to have nothing and everything to do with love. Presented in the style of the traditional church pageant, this will be a combination of rehearsed readings, songs, and fully realized performances showcasing a diverse cross-section of the San Francisco theater scene.

Featuring: Molly Benson, Stuart Bousel, Sara Briendel, Xanadu Bruggers, Meg Cohen, Ashley Cowan, Katarina Fabic, Ryan Hayes, Allison Herman, Warden Lawlor, Carl Lucania, Joseph Miller, Kai Morrison, Carole Swann, Rana Weber.

The San Francisco Theater Pub is focused on premiering re-imagined classics, original work and workshops, and general creativity of the rehearsed and scripted variety in a casual bar environment where theater artists and audience can mix and work.

Monday, February 15, 2010
7:30 PM (show starts at 8)
Cafe Royale
800 Post (at Leavenworth), San Francisco

ADMISSION IS FREE!!! (though we love it if you donate a couple bucks)

Reservations are not necessary, but we do encourage you to get there around 7:30 to ensure a good seat.

CYCLOPS

2010-01-11T12:32:00.000-08:00

CYCLOPS
A staged reading with live music

By Euripides
Adapted and Directed by Bennett Fisher

Featuring Molly Benson, Stuart Bousel, Katrina Bushnell, Tom Cokenias, Lindsay Cookson, Matt Gunnison, Julia Heitner, Sean Kelly, James Kierstead, Sam Leichter, Paul Stout, Kari Wolman, and more.

With live folk music performed by West of Shannon before, after, and during the performance.

Monday, January 18 at 7:30pm
Cafe Royale. 800 Post St, San Francisco (at Leavenworth)

What better way to open the San Francisco Theatre Pub than with a staged reading of the oldest play about drinking?

In the only surviving satyr play, master tragedian Euripides flexes his comedic muscles in a riotous retelling of the famous story from the Odyssey that is anything but Homeric. Shipwrecked on the island of the man-eating Cyclops (Sean Kelly), Odysseus (Stuart Bousel) narrowly avoids being made into a snack through his quick thinking, fast talking, and a magical flask of wine that refills itself.

Adapter and director Bennett Fisher, a cast of great local actors, and a live folk band capture all the bawdiness, braininess, and bombast of this overlooked comedic masterpiece in a brisk thirty minutes.

Join us for the official kick off event for the San Francisco Theatre Pub. Drinking and dancing are highly encouraged.

GLEE

2009-12-03T10:01:00.000-08:00

I have to admit- I have such a love/hate relationship with this show. I adored the pilot and thought it was brilliantly written, crafted and acted, but almost every episode since has been a 50/50 split for me between good/bad, sincere/forced and cool/third-party embarrassing. It's like the show has two heads and one is making good television and one is making bad television, and the result is that I've yet to see an episode as good as the pilot.

That said, last night had for me the best moment in this entire series so far, which was Rachel's inner monologue at the mirror when she was getting the picture done for the yearbook and Finn had failed, once again, to stand by her. I loved this moment because I, like Rachel, have spent a huge portion of my life trying to follow my passions while still trying to be a good person, and thus have become, for better or worse, a leader in my own arts community. What I loved about this moment is that it so sincerely captured what happens to every leader at some point in their life: the realization that they became the leader because nobody else was willing to stand up and take the reins- and that their willingness to do so would not only make them lonely, but probably resented by those who should have stood with them but didn't have the courage to do so. So much of the series is about Rachel being crapped on and the other characters- many of whom I find much more obnoxious than Rachel, who I think is always compassionate even when she's being ambitious- hating her while still constantly benefiting from her presence, her talent and her good will and desire to keep including the people even after they fail her, torture her and abandon her. What I have been waiting for this whole season is that moment when we could finally see that Rachel understood why she was constantly being torn down- and then have her rise above it. Thankfully the writers finally gave us that moment and Lea Michele nailed it.

I think in the success of Rachel's story line lies a good deal of the success of the show. From my perspective the only characters who come close to having her appeal are Quinn (who has thankfully, for all her brittleness, turned out to be the most intelligent and the most moral- aside from her understandable fear of revealing the father of her baby- character), Kurt's Dad (who is a refreshingly compassionate father figure to a gay teenager- especially for mainstream television), and Puck (who I think had more chemistry with Rachel than Finn does) because he's such a prick but he wants to be a better person and just doesn't know how to be (his scene on the bleachers with Rachel at the end of the episode where they dated is my second favorite scene since the pilot). What makes these characters stand out is that they are written with a good deal more complexity than the others (I also love Brittnay but it's because I find her genuinely funny and endearing, but not compelling) and they act in ways that are both unexpected/a-stereotypical AND YET, also believable and consistent. They are all good people but not without flaws and misguided beliefs and actions. These are not just people we could know, but people we could be if put in the same situation. I'm hoping the series continues to focus on these people while also either beefing up the content (while toning down the absurdity) of the other characters (like Emma, who has crossed the line of believably stupid in regards to her relationship with Ken, or Sue, whose motivations seem to change so often she has ceased to make any sense) or phasing out the ones who can't be salvaged (Terri, I suspect, will never be allowed to be likable or even sympathetic, which just makes her annoying and a prop for the plot as opposed to a character). Like Rachel at the mirror, I'd like to see GLEE as a whole have it's come to Jesus moment and stop caring so much about being hip or funny and eschew the absurdity (which just feels like a feeble attempt at trying to make people feel okay for watching a musical television show) in exchange for the one thing that really does make long-form network television work: characters we love to watch.

There are glimpses of a show down between Rachel and Quinn in next week's finale and I really hope both women acquit themselves together as well as they have separately. To me, the show is about them, and I'd love to see them both realize they're actually better than Finn- stronger, smarter, more talented, and better written.

FUNDRAISER

2009-09-17T09:41:00.000-07:00

What: No Nude Men Production's 2009 Fundraiser
When: October 17 (one month from tonight!) at 7:30
Where: PariSoma at 1436 Howard St (between 10th and 11th Street)

For one night only, No Nude Men will bring you another fabulously entertaining evening of short readings, featuring work by some of the city's best and brightest writers, and performances by company regulars and new faces alike. An open wine bar, delicious appetizers and deserts, multiple chances to win some fabulous door prizes and more completes this potentially quite perfect evening, all yours for a mere $20.00! All proceeds go directly to supporting our 2009-2010 season, which is shaping up to be our most exciting ever with two world premieres (Better Homes and Ammo written and direct by Wylie Herman, and Giant Bones, directed and adapted by Stuart Bousel from the novel by Peter S. Beagle), our largest new play festival ever (featuring 12 new plays by 14 different writers), a new production of The Tempest right on the California coast, and a host of other great shows on the horizon!

The evening will include plays by Wylie Herman, Miranda Calderon, Hilde Susan Jaegtnes, David Duman, Ben Fisher and Jennifer Sullivan Brych and feature performances by Molly Benson, Stuart Bousel, Katarina Fabic, Ben Fisher, Jennie Gebhardt, Matt Gunnison, Julia Heitner, Wylie Herman, Nirmala Nataraj, Warden Lawlor, Rik Lopes, Carl Lucania, Karen Offereins, Cassie Powell, James Tinsley.

The more the merrier! Please tell/bring friends, fellow thespians, etc. Please feel free to pass this e-mail on to anyone who you think might be interested!

And if you'd like to make a donation, but can't make the event, please e-mail the hosts to find out how. Every little bit helps keep us going strong as we enter our seventh season of independently produced theater. The economy is in the tank, we know, but that means is now more important than ever to help individual voices be heard and stoke the creative fires that keep our city unique, compassionate, progressive and diverse. No Nude Men has always been about providing a flexible, no gimmicks platform for individuals to spring from with projects ranging from neo-classicalre-boots (Loves Labors Lost, Phaedra, Hamlet) to literary bedrock (The Monk, The Book of Genesis, No Exit) to romantic comedies (Speak to Me, Fishing, Love Egos Alternative Rock) to flights of fancy and surrealism (Oasis, Spoon Justice, Five Short Episodes in the Life of Sacagawea, Learning from Hilde's Mistakes). As we seek to expand our roster of associate artists and the varieties and venues of performances, you'd be amazed to know just how far a mere $20.00 goes.

Hope to see you at the show(s)!

COMPLAINT

2009-08-19T11:08:00.000-07:00

Per my usual practice of posting publicly any spears I throw at the community in general, here is my letter to the editor of the San Francisco Weekly regarding their cover story on Wednesday, August 19, 2009.

Hey Tom,

So, I used to work for the Tucson Weekly, and so I understand that these sorts of publications are supposed to be a bit inflammatory and "alternative", whatever the hell that means any more, but I thought I'd take a moment to smack you in the head with a journalistic integrity bat and say WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU THINKING? In an era when people are losing jobs and homes, schools are being shut down, arts and education programs cut and all other manner of mayhem due to economic downturn, how dare you run a story that glorifies some douche bag who blows 500 bucks a week at a bar AND NOT HAVE A THEATER SECTION IN YOUR LISTINGS. How dare you give half a page to the only thing in this week's edition even smacking of newsworthy (Towing The Line by Lauren Smiley). I understand that it's the job of Weeklies to be "cool" and thus, in this city, pander to intellectually shoddy, self-absorbed (but not self-reflecting), over-privileged hipsters, but I would hope we draw the line at publishing four page articles that only further underline the larger world's general conception of us as bunch of smug limousine liberals too partied out to think straight or do much more than endlessly justify in quips and faux-edginess (but precious little action or upholding of standards) the golden pedestal we constantly put ourselves on.

Worst part? I'm a pretty loyal fan of the Weekly and Weeklies in general and I'm a local theater artist who has done well by the Weekly and has them to thank for a good chunk of my success in the Bay Area. But I'm willing to put all that on the line and forsake the support of this publication because I'm THAT disappointed in what I see going on here. It is the job of the alternative weekly, in my opinion, to save the fluff for a column or better yet, The Chronicle, and provide an articulate forum for local politics, support for local businesses and artists, and in all other ways cultivate its community (and readership) in a direction that is positive, healthy, cultural, informed and progressive. Profiling the local party boys as if it's worthy of the paper the story is printed on is questionable at any time, but at this moment in our society when so many are struggling to do good against all odds and journalistic integrity is already under so much fire, such a decision is not only irresponsible but flat out reprehensible.

See you at the bar.

Stuart Bousel

FESTIVAL

2009-08-14T09:02:00.001-07:00

ANNOUNCING:

NO NUDE MEN’S MOST AMBITIOUS THEATER FESTIVAL TO DATE!

Fellow writers, we are holding a new play reading festival in 2010 of Olympic proportions and we’d love for you to be a part of it.

The theme is The Twelve Olympians- those principal deities of ancient Greece that linger still in the back of our minds, taunting us with their seductive archetypes and passionate stories of power, obsession, love and transformation. The object: to create twelve full-length plays, one per god, to be presented as a reading, three a week for four weeks at the Exit Stage Left, starting July 8th 2010 and running till July 31st.

What do you get?

1)To Keep Your Play. After that first reading it belongs to you, entirely.

2)Tentative Publication. If everyone agrees, we could look into creating a chapbook of the twelve and releasing them as a collection with royalties for everybody!

3)1 third of your box office of the night of your reading. The 2nd third goes to your cast. The 3rd third goes to No Nude Men to pay for the space.

4)A chance to be part of a unique new play festival we will promote the crap out of and everything cool that comes with that (like parties, connections, cute classics nerds asking for your phone number, etc.)

What are the rules?

Your play may take place in any time period or setting, but must adhere to the following:

1)It must be titled the name of your god.

2)Your god must appear as a character, though they do not have to be the main character.

3)The focus of the play must be the god or the god’s impact/purpose, even if you choose to have the main character (s) be someone else.

4)The use of pre-existing material is probably necessary in a project like this, but no transcriptions, please (i.e. don’t just take THE BACHAE and re-write it word for word). By the same token, don’t feel behold to rehash the old myths- you can write a new myth, or a combination of known myths, or your take on one myth in particular, or something else entirely- just don’t plagiarize the master poets (and yes, we’ll know if you do- that’s how much of a geek I am).

5)The goddess Hestia must appear as a character in your play, though the nature and size of her role is up to you. Why? Because we have decided to go with the post-Dionysian Olympian line up, but traditionally Hestia and NOT Dionysus was one of the twelve Olympians: she gave up her throne to the younger god because her site of worship, the hearthstone (she was the goddess of fire) was in every home in the world- making her arguably the most powerful goddess in Greece. Ironically she has no real importance to the mythic cycle- which makes me think it’s time to give her a little love.

6)The play must be a minimum of 80 minutes. It does not have to be two acts (though that is preferable) but it must be full-length.

7)You must be able to submit 20 minutes worth by 12/12/2009.

8)You must be willing to cast and put together your own rehearsal schedule for the show. Again, these are straight up readings (not staged readings) so rehearsal should be minimal anyway (though you want these to sound rehearsed- think of it as good radio theater- live!). If you want to hire/designate a director to do this that is also fine. The point is- you’re responsible for making your particular night as awesome as possible (though we will provide tech and take care of all space management issues, box office, programs, etc.)

9)Single writers or teams are fine; however, teams of two or more must be willing to share their dividend of the box office (i.e. they split the writer’s third, they don’t cut into the rest of the box office_

I’m convinced, I can do this, now how do I get involved?

Basically, send us an e-mail at endymion82@aol.com. In the e-mail you need to

1)Select one of the Twelve Olympians as your very own.

2)Tell me why that god, why you, and what you propose to do in 500 words or less. Nothing you say here will be set in stone, it’s really just to get the ideas flowing.

Viola!

The Twelve Olympians are:

Zeus, god of the sky, weather, king of gods and men.
Hera, goddess of marriage and power, queen of the gods.
Athena, goddess of wisdom, craftsmanship, justice and honor.
Hephaestus, god of blacksmithing, weaponry, armor, volcanoes.
Ares, god of war, violence, destruction and chaos.
Apollo, god of music, poetry, healing, prophecy and twin of Artemis.
Artemis, goddess of hunting, animals, maidenhood and twin of Apollo.
Dionysus, god of wine, theater, madness.
Poseidon, god of the sea and earthquakes, horses and water.
Demeter, goddess of grain, farming, fruit and motherhood.
Hermes, god of mathmatics, travelers, writing, secrets and commerce.
Aphrodite, goddess of love, beauty, sensuality, seduction.

DEADLINES FOR ENTRY ARE SEPTEMBER 13 2009.

SUMMER

2009-06-17T15:51:00.000-07:00

TWO FANTASTIC SHOWS ARE ON THEIR WAY TO YOU- AS WE SPEAK!

First up...

TAI SHARM AND THE KING, No Nude Men's 2009 contribution to this year's theater festival. Actually a fragment of Stuart Bousel's in-progress adaptation of GIANT BONES, a novel by Peter "The Last Unicorn" S. Beagle, this 30 minute fairy tale tells the story of Tai-Sharm (Ashley Cowan) a beautiful and intelligent peasant girl who is raised by her mother (Syri Mongiello) to believe that she is stupid- for her own benefit. After she is kidnapped by an evil court adviser (Wylie Herman) to be married off to a chronically depressed king (Christopher P. Kelly) she develops a romantic relationship with a magical fish (Matt Gunnison) and the world's greatest thief (James Tinsley) that may yet save her from a lifetime of glamorous despair. Narrated by Kendra Arimoto and Chantal Benson and featuring the acting debut of Leo Mikulich.

The show happens at the Waterfall Stage, at 12:20 PM in the Yerba Buena Gardens and, like the rest of the festival, is absolutely FREE! It all happens on Sunday, July 26th. You can even stick around for a 3:25 preview of...

THE FROGS

Stuart Bousel heads back to the woods this summer to collaborate with Atmostheatre/Theater In The Woods on a new adaptation of Aristophanes' classic tale of Dionysus, the god of wine and theater (Nathan Tucker), his down-trodden slave Xanthias (Warden Lawlor) and their road trip to Hades to find a poet worthy of saving the arts. Will they go with classical and high-browed Aeschylus (Carl Lucania) or edgy and subversive Euripedes (Ben Fisher)? Will Xanthias score with Persephone's dippy handmaiden (Theresa Miller) or will he end up getting spanked by an over-zealous Hecate (Tristan Cunningham) who is out for vengeance on a naughty Hercules (Sam Leichter). Featuring Katarina Fabic as the Queen of the Dead with Xanadu Bruggers, Victor Carrion, Julia Heitner and Jessica Rudholm as a chorus of singing frogs and the three-headed dog Cerberus as himself, the play will take place in multiple locations throughout a beautiful redwood preserve in Woodside, California.

Tickets are on sale now ($10-20) and we highly recommend getting tickets early as we often sell out our shows in advance.

For advanced tickets, please visit Brown Paper Tickets' web site:

http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/70662

If you'd like to make a phone reservation, please visit our web site's Box Office page:

www.atmostheatre.com

THE FROGS will run from August 1 thru September 6
on Saturdays and Sundays @ 1:00pm.

INFORMERS

2009-05-05T11:39:00.000-07:00

I haven't commented on a film on IMDB in years but this movie seems to be getting mostly slammed so I feel a need to log one for other side because I am definitely a fan.

I'm going to talk about the movie as a whole, so consider this SPOILERS warning.

I can see why some people wouldn't like this movie. It's definitely not a comedy and it's definitely not mainstream. The majority of the characters are not likable, though most of them are sympathetic- which is what I think bothers so many audience members: you can't automatically hate Graham, Les, Christie, Laura, Carole, etc. because you pity them, and maybe even empathize with them. And that is a feeling most people don't want to feel, especially at the movies, where we have been led to believe we should always expect characters we want to relate to, and a few hours of escape from reality to boot.

This movie isn't an escape. It's glitzy and polished, it's full of beautiful people, but that's the lure that gets you into the trap. And this movie is a trap: it's about how there is no escape because life doesn't end just because the credits roll and the things you do and are done to you are going to be with you forever. So choose wisely- or at the very least, humanely. That's the lesson Graham is supposed to learn in this film. The ending is ambiguous as to if he learns it or not. Either way, it's not a lesson most of us want to be confronted with, especially on a night out, and it's really not something we want to be confronted with by a movie only to have the movie fail to then tell us what to think by having a clear cut resolution for the character. One of the reasons I don't like BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN is that I feel it not only depicts mostly fairly despicable objects of pity- IT ROMANTICIZES them. Nothing in THE INFORMERS is romantic. It's the anti-thesis of romantic. Because of that I find the movie brave instead of offensive by its decision to focus on the ugly, damaged people of the world. This is best demonstrated in the scene where Laura and William, in the midst of a fight about his mistress, must stop so she can give him an insulin shot. Here they are, two glamorous people with money out of their ears and no "real" problems except one another and yet he still needs someone to take care of him and she knows she can't say no in this situation. People get trapped like this every day.

There is a lot of bile thrown at this film for it's lack of morality but I actually find the film very moral: the idea of "good" is integral to the story and characters. It just never gets defined. Which is true for most people in the real world too, unless they have subscribed to some notion of "good" outside of themselves- i.e. religion, the law, etc. The people in the INFORMERS have been placed outside of the usual social constructs of good, however, because they are famous (The Rock Star), wealthy (William and Laura), beautiful (Graham, Martin, Christie), losers (Jack and his uncle), observers (Carole) or liars (Tim) and so now they must struggle to find a new morality- which is hard when you're living in a society that doesn't appreciate thinking for yourself and if anything encourages everyone to look, act and think the same (LA/Hollywood). There is a reason why almost all the outsiders in the movie are brunettes. There is also a reason why they are almost always the most thoughtful, sympathetic people in the story (Raymond, Rachel, Nina, and even Susan is clearly a bottle blonde starting to let her roots show). This movie is about people who have been conforming/buying into the glitz and gluttony game, but who are waking up to realize (mostly too late) what they may have lost for doing so. Some of them are struggling not to vanish. Some of them are even trying to warn us. That's where the title comes from.

The technical parts of the movie are hard to fault. It looks beautiful and the dialogue and scenes move with a sleek economy, reduced to the bare bones of what each character, scene, story needs. Perhaps people don't realize this is a drama because it's not overblown like most Hollywood dramas. There are no big speeches. There are no tears. There are few breakdowns. But there often aren't in real life, especially amongst people who are not good at being in touch with their feelings. And if these people were good at being in touch with their feelings, chances are the stuff that happens to them, wouldn't be happening. Of course, we want them to have these big "moments" in the same way we want people we love but who are emotionally shut off to open up and cry and do all those things we hope they will do to heal. But most of the people in this story don't want to heal. As Tim informs his dad, it's just too late for most of them. And Tim knows, anyway, that one of the best ways to hurt someone who loves you but has fucked up, is not to yell at them, but rather to simply not respond to them at all or give them the satisfaction of knowing what you feel. I wish to God that was only something that happened in THE INFORMERS but it's not- and I have the ex-boyfriends to prove it.

The acting is beautiful and largely understated. Lines are delivered the way people talk. Kim Basinger is particularly good but Jon Foster should also be given props for being both a beautiful man and a good actor; between the two of them they carry the film. Brad Renfro is, however, the emotional center of the film and his character would be haunting even without the shadow of Renfro's actual death last year. The decision to alter the ending of Jack's story from the book (where he is called Tommy) is a good one and makes sense in light of the decision to combine him with the doorman who chats up Graham while they watch a shooting on the streets- one of the best scenes in the movie. Of the supporting cast Cameron Goodman really stands out as the acerbic, frustrated Susan who is the only person in her family not self-medicating; Jessica Stroup is a memorable Rachel, even if she is gipped out of her best scene in the book. Lou Taylor Pucci nails the angry young gay man still trying to come out of the closet, and is probably one of the most accurate (if not exactly flattering) portrayals of gay youth I've seen in a long time.

The movie isn't flawless. There is a scene between Rachel and Les in the book that I would have loved to see included. Carole's story feels a bit too abbreviated and could have used one more scene of closure. Susan's escape on the train from LA would have been a nice way to bring a bit more balance to the bleakness of the film. A male on male kiss would have been nice, though I applaud the film for being as up front as it was with the bisexuality and in the book there are no gay sex scenes so I can understand the choice to avoid them in the movie- especially if you consider the implication that any tenderness between Graham and Martin is something they are hoping to ignore themselves and dismiss as "just sex". In the end, though, these flaws are really just a wish list because I wanted to see more of this story and these people; there are no missteps in the film itself, from my perspective. And maybe it's best that we don't get more; as the final image of Christie on the beach, waiting for death, tells us: ignorance is often its own kind of bliss.

ACTING

2009-04-09T09:53:00.000-07:00

For Immediate Release

Dark Porch Theatre Presents The In Betweens, April 30 - May 30 at EXIT Stage Left

World-Premiere Play by Margery Fairchild Features Live Music, Dance, and Comedy, Stars Stuart Bousel and Christopher P. Kelly

SAN FRANCISCO, CA, March 13, 2009—Dark Porch Theatre presents the world-premiere production of The In Betweens, an archly witty, wackily comic new work in which dance, live, original music, drawing-room comedy, and the spirit world all collide. Written and directed by Margery Fairchild with Martin Schwartz, the show stars San Francisco director Stuart Bousel, in a rare acting turn, and Christopher P. Kelly, and features guest appearances from Rumi Missabu (of the original Cockettes). Featuring choreography by Fairchild and original music performed by music director Ryan Beebe and band, The In Betweens plays April 30 through May 30 at EXIT Stage Left. Opening night is Friday, May 1. Tickets, priced $10-20, are available at http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/60245 or by emailing darkporchtheatre@gmail.com.

The In Betweens is set in the year 1885. The world is changing at a mighty pace, and at its center stands Silas Danforth (Bousel). Young, rich, and magnetic, Danforth has built an industrial empire, alienating friends and lovers and infuriating do-gooders in the process. And yet, unbeknownst to all of them, he has maintained a private passion for the occult. And so when some of New York's most powerful and infamous figures receive invitations to a parlor seance hosted by Danforth and led by the eccentric mystic Professor M (Kelly), each comes with armed his own agenda has no idea what to expect--least of all the chilling and hilarious revelations from the spirit world they have in store. Infused with magic, music, and wit, The In-Betweens is a celebration of the inconceivable in this world and the next.

The In Betweens is written and directed by Margery Fairchild with Martin Schwartz. Fairchild founded Dark Porch in 2002, and under that banner has created and directed, among others, the San Francisco productions of Hen! (NohSpace, 2005) and Under the Bed: A Fairy Tale Set in Purgatory (The Garage Theatre, 2007). Schwartz, a new creative partner of Dark Porch, is a San Francisco-based playwright and dramaturg, and will be writing and co-creating DPT's movement-theatre production Cockroach at this year's San Francisco Fringe Festival. Music Director Ryan Beebe is the lead singer of Bay Area music groups The Dead Hensons and The Gomorrans.

Dark Porch Theatre presents The In-Betweens

Creative Team:
Written and Directed by Margery Fairchild
with Martin Schwartz
Musical Direction by Ryan Beebee
Choreography by Margery Fairchild
Set and Prop Design by Claire Mack and Jessie Roadkill
Lighting Design by James Tinsley
Costumes by Cara Samski
Dramaturgy and Script Development by Martin Schwartz

Cast:
Molly Benson (Olivia Vanderpoole), Stuart Bousel (Silas Danforth), Will McMichael (Julian Norton), Wylie Herman (George Westcott), Allison Herman-Miller (Nora, Nymph), Christopher P. Kelly (Prof. M), Divina Lubitsch (Rose, Nymph), Sarah Moss (Hester Abbott), Jonathan Signer (Steven, Nymph), Nathan Tucker (Lawrence), Rana Weber (Sylvia Farmington)

Dates and Times:
Plays April 30 through May 30
Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays at 8 p.m.

EXIT Stage Left
156 Eddy St. (between Mason and Taylor)
San Francisco, CA 94102

Tickets:
$10 for April 30 preview, $15-20 all other dates.
Available at http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/60245 or by emailing darkporchtheatre@gmail.com

Press Photos will be available at www.darkporchtheatre.com

Contact:

Margery Fairchild, 510.610.1646
Martin Schwartz, 415.265.7728
darkporchtheatre@gmail.com

WARMUSIC

2009-04-02T10:58:00.001-07:00

Okay, so I saw ACT's production of WAR MUSIC last night and I'm going to go ahead and talk about it with the following caveats: 1) I am a huge Greek Mythology buff and in particular myths and legends surrounding The Trojan War are of interest to me, which leads to caveat 2) I have been working on my own stage adaptation of this story for three years or so (weirdly enough, it's called WARHORSE) and so any reaction to this show, given my background, is going to be a loaded one. What I think will surprise most people is that I didn't hate WAR MUSIC as much they probably think I did. However, I definitely think my version of the tale is superior. Zeus knows it's certainly more exciting.

So, now that I've successfully sucked my own dick for a bit, I'll do my best to keep it out of my surmise of this play and why it totally fails, both as Greek Mythology and much more importantly, as THEATER.

As usual ACT has lavished the show with tremendous production values and while I do ultimately question the decision to put everyone in modern military ware (especially as it made people more indistinguishable- a major problem of the evening) I liked the look of the show and the kind of modern/classical fusion they had going on. There are also some lovely staging moments- the opening, the passing of dawn, the chariot at the end. There are also some lovely performances, though Gregory Wallace continues to stick out like the sore thumb he is, even more so playing Hector, a character that even Shakespeare hesitated to lampoon in TROILUS AND CRESSIDA, so dignified and regal is he. Wallace has no ability to play dignified, a fact that has become apparent after seeing him in a dozen shows over the years. I understand that ACT is probably saddled with him, but can't they at least put him in roles where his broad and flamboyantly flaccid performance will not be offensive? It seems to me that somewhere in here there was some minor character he could have played. He was a good horse, for instance. Why not just make that his cameo and find someone with poise and power to play the flower of Troy?

There are some directing choices which are bad choices. The soldier dance number with the hanging light bulbs was all the cheese of MISS SAIGON without any of the good stuff of MISS SAIGON. It looked just... stupid... and the second act, which was much weaker than the first, never ever recovered from it. The dancing Hephaestus moment was a bit ridiculous too but it worked somewhat better as I had already figured out at that point that the gods were going to be treated rather tongue in cheek and stripped of whatever dignity they usually have (though Thetis was still given her usual cold poise and elegance, thanks in no small part to Rene's typically majestic performance). In regards to both choices, however, I found myself having, ultimately, the same reaction: why? That reaction is the short story version of my whole review.

Because ultimately the problems I have with this show are with the script (and not just because I'm a rival playwright in this case), though I do think better directing choices could have been made to improve on a faulty script. However, in this case, the adaptor and the director are one, so the blame is really not too hard to pin, if one needs to pin it. And one does, because this is an incredible story and these are incredible characters and with ACT's resources and audience, we should have been given an incredible show and we weren't. And by the time the play ended last night the audience was one third empty, and I can't blame anyone who left. I would have too, if I didn't have such a high degree of professional curiosity in this case.

The problem with the script is that, for all its modern references and dance breaks, it's actually far too reverent to the true source material of the ILIAD. And I say the ILIAD because that is a distinct entity from the larger story of THE TROJAN WAR. As many a classics nerd will tell you, THE ILIAD is in fact one book of anywhere from 16-32 (depending on who you ask) telling the story of the Trojan War from it's very beginning (literally the building of Troy) to its very end- i.e. the last wandering survivor finding his home and/or grave. Most of the other books don't exist, though the legends live on through the plays, other poems (like THE AENEID), and general traditions that have survived the centuries in a way that parchment and stone tablets did not. The ILIAD focuses primarily on the conflict between Achilles and Agamemnon, and ends with Agamemnon killing Hector in retribution for Patroclus and the return of Hector's body to Troy to the sounds of Cassandra's lament. Taken in that light, one realizes that the characters of the ILIAD are ones which have been developed for a substantial time before the first line of the poem as we know it, and in many cases go on to be further developed in the now lost parts that follow that last line. So, one also realizes, when one is a modern adaptor, that they must do a fair amount of filling in the gaps if they want to have whole, substantial people on stage, because unlike the ancient poets, they can not rely on the idea that the general audience will come into this with knowledge or even possible access to the backstory, and thus understand the true SIGNIFIGANCE of the people whose story they are watching. WAR MUSIC, however, is almost a literal staging of most of the ILIAD (we never get to Hector's death) and with very little attempt at providing either context or back story. More importantly, because the adaptors have been so reverent to the word but not the spirit of the original, we are suddenly introduced, mid-action, to a whole bunch of characters who we do not know and never get to know and so this show shoots itself in the foot right off the bat- because if we can't get to know the characters, we can't relate, and if we can't relate we don't care what happens to them, and if we don't care we find ourselves, at the end of almost three hours, asking "Why?"

Anyone who attempts to adapt the Trojan Saga knows that this story is an embarassment of riches: there are hundreds of great characters to choose from and legends to keep or ignore. The only mistake I think you can make is to try and include ALL of them- because to do so in a two-three hour evening is essentially to dump your audience in a sea sans a life-preserver. This is exactly what WAR MUSIC does, however, and gives us so many random Greek kings and Trojan Nobles that the play becomes hours of talking heads, none of whom get enough singular stage time to really become fleshed out personalities. Some collapsing of minor characters and redistributing of major events into the hands of characters we've gotten to know would readily fix this problem but the adaptor/director seems to have no interest in creating characters. In my version of the story, Patroclus dies at the end of Act One, after only an hour and five minutes, and yet he has more lines and stage time than last night's Patroclus had when he was killed at the 2.5 hour mark. In my version of the story, I'd like to think it's sad when Patroclus dies- you liked him, he calmed Achilles, he defended Briseis, he feels compassion for the battered Greeks... in this version we barely got to know him because he only started speaking lines about five minutes before he's killed. This is clearly just a bad decision from a dramatic standpoint and illustrates my general problem with the show: stuff happens, but we don't know why, and it happens to people we're not permitted to get to know or care about; so thus, stuff happens, but it has no meaning. To me, that is the antithesis theater, which should be all about the witnessing or reporting of significant action- especially at nearly three hours long.

Sadly, WAR MUSIC makes no real attempt at storytelling or story presentation. It moves from point to point in the ILIAD, with each properly named but completely undeveloped talking head spouting poetry at the appointed time before slipping back into anonymity. This is further enhanced by the costuming, which makes everyone, even women, look relatively the same. The God's stand out because they have gold masks and are loud and brash, but their parts are fairly minimal. Achilles is recognizeable because he is barefoot and long-haired (and played by one of the better actors in the show) but he is only in the very beginning and the very end. When he doubles as Paris he is equally as successful and distinguished, and in truth, the only dramatically sound moments come when either he or Helen are on stage because while they might not be likable people, they are at least identifiable as human beings with human needs and not just vehicles for spouting poetry that, while undeniably beautiful, mostly fails as dialogue. The nail in the coffin is that, for all of it's expensive and professional staging (and it's a lot of clean lines, which as we all know, I LOVE), WAR MUSIC is almost entirely devoid of action. And I don't mean full on fight scenes or whatever- in my adaptation, there is intentionally on one "battle" scene and it is meant to hit like a ton of bricks after fifty minutes of talking- I mean action in the oldest and Greekest sense of the term: emotional catharsis. Cause remember, in most Greek theater you never see any action either: the murders, the suicides, the battles, by and large happen offstage and you mostly get some bodies revealed and a character (or the chorus) talking about it all. But they don't just talk: they relive these things before you AND THAT'S THE IMPORTANT PART. Theater began as a way to communally purge and pray together. I am all for narrative plays that rely more on storytelling than story presenting but in order for that to work you need 1) narrators you really care about so that you listen the same way you listen to a friend or family member tell you something to that happened to them and 2) emotional investment on the part of the narrator who doesn't just tell the story but (3) TELLS YOU WHY THE STORY MATTERS- i.e. how it affected THEM. And for all of its high brown poetry, WAR SONG ironically never once delves into the souls of its characters or lets these people say, "And this is how I felt about this!" So even when things happen they don't happen to people, just names we've been told in a sea of names, none attached to a personality or even really a memorable costume... and so why should we care? Who cares what happens to a list of names?

There is one really brilliant moment in the second act where Helen is possessed by the goddess Aphrodite and forced into reseducing her seducer. It is a dark, lovely moment that the actress pulls off nicely and which is frighteningly close to a moment in my own play where Poseidon possesses Odysseus. Both moments bring home the anicent belief that the gods were never very far away and might, in fact, be versions of ourselves we seek to deny or aspire to: thus making us ultimately responsible for the best- and the worst things we do. Derek Walcott, in his beautiful stage adaptation of THE ODYSSEY touches on this in the final moments between Odysseus and Penelope, who asks her husband, "Were there monsters out there?" to which he replies, "Yes. We make them ourselves." It is what makes Greek mythology so fascinating to modern thinkers: we are aware, because of the noble and yet flawed gods and the doomed but courageous heroes that we are not far removed from these brutal and alien people, no matter how many milleniums have passed. A professor of mine once told me he read THE ILIAD every year because over time he found he related to different characters: that once he was Achilles, proud and powerful and ambitious to be recognized; that then he became Hector, a family man with a million responsibilities and a golden-boy reputation that sometimes weighed too much; and now, almost seventy, he was Priam, looking for his lost youth, mourning friends who had died or disappeared, dreaming of Helen's who once touched him in passing. What he told me is the answer to that question of "why?" that we fling out whenever we are asked to watch a version of the Trojan War: because these characters are archetypes, yes, but they are HUMAN archetypes and the war is the context in which we watch these human archetypes battle it out. The war is the human condition, in other words, and the war is all there is. And it's a good story because it is OUR story.

But that's the point they missed last night, and after three hours of nice sets and pretty words, it's also the only tragedy I saw.

RETURNED

2009-03-10T09:46:00.000-07:00

So, after a long, long break I find myself here once again, realizing I have neglected this blog even though I have promised so many times not to. Things have been busy though, and it's hard to stay on top of everything- especially reporting just how busy it all is.

Anyway, in a nutshell: THE MONK happened, and went pretty well. Over 600 people came to see it and we got three very good reviews and one mediocre one, not too surprisingly from THE GUARDIAN. Just as it closed I found out that a play I had written years ago, JOE & CLEO was being done as part of a one-act festival in New York City the weekend before Thanksgiving and my cast from THE MONK, bless their hearts, pooled the money and flew me out there and I got to have a great weekend in NYC, meet some very cool people and fellow artists, and see the first full production of something I wrote in New York City (I've only ever had readings before). Spent some time with Nat and Morgen too, which was great, as I don't see enough of them. But boy was it cold. After that came home and hosted Thanksgiving sans David this year as he was in Florida for work. My boyfriend, Cody, made the Turkey and it actually turned out great. Sank into the holidays after that, with a quick trip home for New Years with my family and friends in Tucson. Cody came along for that too, and blended in nicely.

Since the new year began things have been nothing short of busy. It feels like I literally stepped off the plane on January 5th and have been going full throttle since. I directed David Duman's FISHING over in the East Bay to much acclaim. It's going to close this weekend, having played to a number of full houses, recouped its investment and then some, and with plans to take it to LA for a weekend in April where it will be performed for the Dramatist Guild of America. I am now in the final stages of auditions for THE FROGS, another Atmostheater project that I have been hired to direct this summer. Additionally, I'm playing a leading role in Margery Fairchild's new show, THE IN-BETWEENS, which will mark my return to the stage as an actor. I actually haven't been on stage (without a script in hand) since 2006 so this is really something. Lines are harder to memorize than I remembered and I have to sing. That should be something.

On other fronts things are good but overwhelming. I feel very tired a lot, but like I'm more or less keeping a handle on it. I feel that, with the current state of things in the world at large, to complain of anxiety, stress, fatigue and fear is really a bit niave: everyone is tired. Additionally, I seem to have acquired some chronic post-nasal drip that started in September. I finally went to the doctor about it in January but after a look at my throat and the old "feel the neck and lymphnodes for anything suspicious" move he basically confirmed my own suspicions that I am finally developing Bay Area allergies. A lot of people I know seem to be in this category, whether it's because of the eratic weather we've been having, the residue of ash from the fires the past two summers, or just because, like me, they've been here over six years now and that's usually about how long it takes to develope new ways of confirming the world is out to get us all. Despite this, I think I'm doing okay with just keeping myself focused and I've been exercising more, which is good, though not eating better (which is really "less" because the problem is not that I don't eat good food, I do, I just eat too much) which is something I'd like to be doing as I would love to get back to my pre-panic attack weight. I have a feeling it will make me feel better all around, not to mention help allay some of those random symptoms I still occasionally feel. Couldn't hurt to be cuter either, could it?

I'll try to update this more. No really, I mean it.

PUBLISHED

2008-10-21T09:30:00.000-07:00

Okay, I know, it's been forever since I've been on here, but THE MONK opened on October 9th and has been running full steam ahead, selling out it's first four shows and playing to a good sized crowd at its fifth. We've had two excellent reviews come out, my favorite author in the world came this past Saturday and actually liked it, I found out a short play of mine (JOE & CLEO) is being produced in NYC as part of Hyperion Theater's short play festival this November and last but not least, I published a collection of short stories just in time for my thirtieth birthday, which is fast approaching. Here is a link to the book:

http://www.lulu.com/content/4385210

So, despite pouring over it again and again, looking for mistakes, I of course noticed one the moment I got the finished and bound volume in my hands and it's a doozy: I placed a major Tucson landmark (and a major focal point of my tale, not to mention my personal experience in Tucson) on the wrong street. Can you believe it? And how I missed it after reading that story six times in a row... well, these things happen. We are only human. I have fixed it for subsequent publications and in the meantime I suppose it can be an in-joke for everyone who knows better (which will essentially be anyone actually interested in purchasing this book) but it's still pretty silly. Oh well, as my boyfriend said, "It's your own version of Tucson anyway. Who cares where the turtle pond is in real life?"

The beauty of fiction, I suppose...

लीडिंग माय फर्स्ट वेद्डिंग

2008-08-12T12:38:00.000-07:00

So, this is the ceremony I wrote for my friends Wylie and Alison, who were married this past Saturday in Berkeley and who asked me to officiate their wedding. It contains everything but the wedding vows, which were improvised and beautiful. Enjoy.

Hello and welcome. This is the Herman-Miller wedding, just in case some of you wandered in by accident. Even if you did, we’re glad you’re here for this incredibly important day. A life is made of moments in time, and moments like these are particularly important because the richer a moment is, the richer the life that it’s part of. Of course, the real question then is how do you make a moment richer? There are many ways. Good choice of setting is one- and that’s been taken care of for us by the bride and groom. Good props is often another- and as you can see, we’ve all more or less dressed up to help make this moment special. Good people, however, are I think the absolute best way to make any moment, and one’s life in general, richer. And that’s why it’s so important that each and every one of you came here today to share in this moment, to make Wylie and Alison’s wedding the richest moment of the richest possible lives.

By the way, who am I, you may be asking yourself right now. Or maybe you already know me and you’re wondering why the heck I get to perform the ceremony and you don’t. If it’s any consolation, I don’t really know the answer to that either, but for the record it is a huge honor and I’m incredibly grateful. My name is Stuart by the way. I’m technically Reverand Bouself now, but I’d prefer to keep this informal despite the Universal Church of Light liscense that the bride and groom have so generously purchased for me. I’ve known Wylie since we were both 14 years old. We met in a high school play, which is kind of remarkable since we didn’t go to the same high school but we did both live in Tucson and my school had a drama department and Wylie’s didn’t and so he came and joined us for a show and has been more or less hanging around since. Of all my friends who I have known for over twelve years and there are very few of those so it’s already a pretty exclusive club, Wylie has been the hardest to shake. He has moved with me from drama club days in high school, to a whole new group of friends in Tucson during the college years and after, and he even moved to San Francisco one month ahead of me. Over this time I have had the honor of working with him again and again on a number of plays and creative projects, and I’ve had the much deeper honor of being his friend year after year.

Obviously, I haven’t known Alison as long as I’ve known Wylie, but I do remember when she first showed up. She came to see a play I’d written and directed with Wylie in the lead and she brought him a bouquet of flowers made out of instant oatmeal packets, thus earning her the name “Oatmeal Girl” in our circle of friends for basically the next six months. Often times, when people would ask me, “Hey, how is Wylie doing?” I would respond, “Good. He’s still dating Oatmeal Girl.” And everyone would nod and say, “Oh yeah, Oatmeal Girl. She was cute.” But when I asked Wylie about Oatmeal Girl he would say, “Her name is Alison and she’s fine.” Which is pretty much how I knew that he was more or less serious about her.

It took me a while to get to know Alison. I think the hardest thing in the world is to date someone who has lots of established friends and to her credit she really did her best to be a part of our world but it was hard, I’m sure, and we’re not always the most gracious bunch of drama kids. It didn’t help that Alison is so incredibly smart and well-spoken and usually that’s my job. But it all turned around one day when I called Wylie and Alison picked up the phone because he’d left it with her and after she told me he wasn’t around said, “Can I talk to you for a moment?” And I thought, “Oh God, here it comes. She’s going to ask, “Stuart, why are you so distant and unfeeling,” but instead she kind of laughed hysterically and said, “So I just got this haircut and it totally doesn’t look right and I don’t know what to do.” Which, really, for the record, kind of knocked the wind out of me. I mean, I too have had some really bad hair days but I was never quite so charming about it and as Alison went on to tell me that she was fine with her new weird hair she just needed to adjust to it and could she just please unload on me because it would help her let go of her previous, better looking hair, I sat there thinking, “Wow, I really like this girl.” And more importantly, “I’m so glad Wylie is with this girl because she is so human and so open and he needs so much help with his hair.”

After that, Alison really became part of the gang. She also started acting, which helped. She joined me and Wylie for a satire of Les Miserables we did in which she played Eponine and he played an angry mob and a sock puppet. Last summer we spent it together in the woods performing A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM and for those of you who haven’t heard the story Wylie actually proposed to Alison just after curtain call of our second preview. He’d gotten Gregorio, our costumer, to measure her ring finger as part of her costume fitting- which is one of those ways Wylie demonstrated how crafty he can be. He also did it on the day we had wine and snacks for the audience after the show, thus saving himself the trouble of planning and catering an engagement party. Very slippery of him, I think. But I’m glad he did it because that way I got to be there and Alison got to wear her fairy wings, which was a lifelong dream of hers, and since I’m the one who cast her as a fairy, I suppose that’s why I get to perform this ceremony.

In the end, the exact reason for me being up here doesn’t matter, because we’re all here today for the same reason: Wylie and Alison’s love, which I have been lucky enough to witness from the beginning and up until this moment, and which I am hoping to keep witnessing for many many years to come. They have the kind of genuine, profound and supportive relationship that makes the lives of everyone they touch happier by proximity. They make each other laugh, they make each other think, and they make each other strive to be better people. I have seen Wylie hold Alison while she cries and I have seen Alison calm Wylie down when he’s angry. I have seen them take care of one another. And that is so very very rare that we find someone not only willing to take care of us, but find great joy in it. Someone who says to us, “You are, as you are, not only everything I wanted, but more than I could have ever hoped or imagined or asked for.” I hope they always continue to be that person for each other, and I hope all of you find that person too, if you haven’t already. It is the only real magic in the world, but thankfully it’s the best magic there is.

And now I’d like to turn this over to the Bride and Groom, who would like to speak their vows.

VOWS GO HERE

Do you, Alison Michelle Miller take Wylie Seth Herman to be your husband?
Do you, Wylie Seth Herman take Alison Michelle Miller to be your wife?

Now, by the Power Vested in Me, I pronounce you husband and wife. You may now kiss the bride.

Ladies and Gentlemen, it is my great honor to present to you my dear friends, Mr. and Mrs. Herman.

Ladies and Gentlemen, thank you for your attention. The Bride and Groom has asked that you all help us send them on their way by standing up and following us as they take their first walk together as a married couple. This way we can all share in the beginning of their life together. As we do so, we’d also like to ask that you keep those of us who could not be here today in your thoughts, so that in this way they can be a part of this celebration and everyone who is a part of it. Once we’ve reached the bridge the Bride and Groom will continue beyond it with the wedding party, however we ask that the rest of you please exit through the amphitheater and enjoy the gardens until 3 PM when the reception will begin at the conference center. Thank you.

इ'म बेक

2008-06-23T16:54:00.000-07:00

I know, it's been a long time, and yes, I know, the titles are still in some kind of strange scrawl (though I'm starting to like that) but things have been busy and I was dizzy in the head for like three months... five thousand or so doctors' appointments and an mri, ct scan and hearing test later we still don't know why i'm dizzy, only that it's not caused by anything serious and it's starting to fade anyway, thanks to much love from my amazing boyfriend and regular neck and back massages.

So it was time to put a period in that paragraph and move on. HEIST A CROW has been doing very well, earned me a little space in the Chronicle, and got some decent props from the Weekly, which knocked the script but liked my directing choices (though I wasn't named specifically, so Sean still wins that round). Saw a dreadfully bad play called THE JOURNEY OF THE ANGELS that was very well acted but just horribly horribly written, that Latin-American Magical Realism crap that has gotten so big but without those elements of subtlety that makes it so good when it's done well (ala HOUSE OF SPIRITS or LIKE WATER FOR CHOCOLATE). Beyond that the show was just written with a soap opera aesthetic (people screaming in every scene, characters literally brought on stage to go crazy or have breakdowns and tearful monologues) and yet devoid of the fun of soap operas (literally, there was no comic relief in two hours). Pretentious beyond a doubt and made worse because I had a friend involved (though her performances was great, as was the leading lady). I have discovered that I have less and less tolerance for bad theater: it's time I will never get back. I start tapping my knees uncontrollably. It's like a seizure. The ghost of CURTAINS still lingers in my brain.

Recently picked up the recorded version of the soundtrack to the stage musical version of LORD OF THE RINGS. They didn't change the score much from when I saw it in Toronto, though apparently they heavily revised the book. It's great music, almost totally perfect in pitch and style, thankfully very much in sync with its subject matter (as you may recall, I hate when musicals sound like musicals but are supposed to be in certain regions or eras). I just wish the show had been better. Or that they had said, "FUCK IT, let's just write a new medieval quest show and not try to bite off more than we can chew (and show) in three hours.

Reading a trashy Mary Stewart gothic romance called THUNDER ON THE RIGHT. Soooo entertaining. Just finished THE COAST OF UTOPIA saga by Tom Stoppard. Better novels than plays, I think, but still, really good stuff so I'm not complaining. Tons of quotable theory on individuality, human desire, the swath of history. Working on several writing projects, including a play that began its life as a novel many many years ago. It's a dark little piece about four crystal meth users in San Francisco and I do sort of wonder if it's actually profound and daring like I think it is or just some kind of new druggie porn that I'm developing (just in time for Pride, no less). THE MONK is heading towards its production dates steadily, with costumes and props currently being the mission and thrift stores being raided accordingly. My concept has gone from a more calculated attempt to reproduce the time period to a kind of vague formalism, with men and women in dress clothes and the period touches more subtle- masks, capes, shawls, hats, a doublet here and there, etc. The fliers are done and look amazing and Cody and Nirmala have all kinds of crazy tricks up their sleeves for everything from posters to comic books... kind of overwhelming to be putting so much into this show. But fortune favors the brave, right?

इ'म बेक बेबी

2008-06-23T15:55:00.001-07:00

ओपनिंग तवो वीक्स फ्रॉम तोनिघ्त!

2008-05-23T15:23:00.000-07:00

HelpWalrus Produces Sean Kelly’s

HEIST A CROW

written by Sean Kelly
directed by Stuart Bousel

featuring:
Matt Gunnison
Jay Middleton
Jesse Mueller
Carol Rhyu
Tony Sommers
Rana Weber

Performances: Fridays & Saturdays, June 6-28, 8:00 pm, 7:30 door.
Tickets: $15. Pay at the door or purchase on the web at http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/35196

Location: Stage Werx at 533 Sutter St . (at Powell)

Info: http://www.helpwalrus.com or 415.385.6296

HEIST A CROW is an original, absurd comedy about the afterlife. Follow John, a newly-dead, recently-spurned thief (Matt Gunnison) and a disgruntled reaper (Rana Weber) through eternity and points elsewhere as they try to win back the lives they never had. Battling an evil coke-fiend real-estate agent (Tony Summers), an abused angel looking to blow the joint (Carol Rhyu), and a misogynist higher being who may be all powerful or may just be lazy (Jesse Mueller), the duo must track down the souls guarded by a reluctant pentecostal priest (Jay Middleton) before John loses himself (and his love) to a fate worse than death.

Buzzing the metaphysics of Judeo-Christianity and Greek mythos in a blender, Heist a Crow is a family story about the not-so-desirable effects of inter-planar transport, life, death, shiny objects and subverting faith.

Stage Werx Theatre is a cutting edge underground theatre located in San Francisco 's throbbing Theatre District one block from Union Square . Stage Werx is an intimate 55+ seat theatre with a steampunk cabaret lobby that will transport audiences even before the show starts. Look for cutting edge new works, brilliantly twisted adaptations, circus, comedy, movies, music, mayhem and more.

फौर वीक्स फ्रॉम तोनिघ्त!

2008-03-21T10:54:00.000-07:00

Yes, it's coming! It rides in on the spring wind like Santa Claus rides in on the backs of oppressed elves quietly plotting his overthrow...

It's the 2008 No Nude Men Annual Fundraiser!

Friday, April 18th, 7 PM, No Nude Men will be holding their 2008 fundraiser to help subsidize this year's major project, a new stage adaptation (by local writer Nirmala Nataraj) of Matthew Lewis's ground breaking horror novel, THE MONK (for more information, visit our myspace page at http://www.myspace.com/ambrosioandmatilda). We would love for you to come and bring all your friends and maybe even some random people you find between now and then as it will make for a better evening and a better show when we open this October 10 at The Exit Theater.

Here is what you'll get for only $10-20 (sliding scale) donations at the door!

A chance to win some fabulous prizes, including theater tickets to ACT, CAL SHAKES and whatever else we can scrape together (and if you'd like to donate a prize, please let us know, we're still looking for handouts!)

Free wine and appetizers (made by us!)

Three hilarious short theater readings of work by incredible local talents David Duman, Meghan Kane, Alison Luterman and Mike Ricca, with performances including the talents of Kendra Arimoto, Molly Benson, Michaela Greeley, Wylie Herman, Warden Lawlor, Karen Offereins, Randy Taradash and special guests Steve Heist and David Rice as fabulously British lobsters.

The first sneak preview of THE MONK!

It all happens on Friday, April 18th, at 7 PM, at Space 180 (180 Capp Street, between 16th & 17th, Third Floor).

FUNDRAISER FAQs

1. Stuart, how can David and Steve be lobsters? I have met them several times, and I know they are people just like you and me.

Actually, they aren't. David and Steve are were-lobsters. When placed in water they transform. It's like Darryl Hannah in SPLASH. And who doesn't love SPLASH?

2. Stuart, like you and everyone you know, I am poor. Why on earth, given the current economy, would I donate my measly salary to your silly theater company that mostly serves your own sick delusions of artistic merit?

You were just going to drown your sorrows at the bar anyway. So... why not bring that twenty dollars to our party instead? You can still get drunk but it will be cheaper and more entertaining, plus, you'll notice, I didn't write any of these plays, so you can support my sick delusions and other people's at the same time- which makes it doubly charitable. The truth is, depending on the perspective, all of us are delusional and pursuing something that, given the right context, seems selfish and unimportant. For me that's theater, but who knows what that is for you? Does this mean either of us should be condemned? No. But why should theater be supported? Well, as this country continues to not support its artists it becomes more important for individuals to help individual artists because it continues to create the cacophony of multiple desires and ambitions that makes this society great. Artists are the first line in the ever-lasting war to keep individual thought and expression free AND PUBLIC. By supporting the arts, especially the indy arts, you are saying that you not only support freedom of thought and expression, but that you encourage it, even if the thoughts being expressed are not your own. And the fact is, with a group our size, even a small contribution goes a long way- which means you can see where your money is going. Mostly it goes to paying our rent at places like the EXIT THEATER and other bastions of independent expression that are becoming more and more scarce as our fair city becomes progressively expensive and thus, tragically, progressively homogenous in thought and intellectual output. And who wants that? Didn't we move here because of San Francisco's legacy of freedom? Well, freedom is meaningless without public discourse and discourse is meaningless without a multiplicity of ideas and forums where they can be presented and... wait? I'm sorry, did you just say you moved here for the food? Oh, well, guess I should shut up then...

3. Stuart, I love you and your theater company, but I can't make the fundraiser. Should I still donate and how can I do that?

Yes, you can still donate if you'd like to. Just e-mail me and we'll figure something out.

4. Stuart, is it safe for me to go to Capp Street on a Friday night?

Yeah. More or less. I mean, it's not like you're gonna be there as late as I will be, and I'm not worried about it. Mostly.

No, really, it's fine. The neighborhood is a bit seedy, but perfectly safe during heavy traffic hours. We've worked there on a couple different occasions and have never had a problem. And hey, if you are looking to score some crack or a terrifyingly tragic hooker... well... now you can do that AND support the arts!

5. No, really, are David and Steve going to be dressed as lobsters?

No. The three plays we are doing are readings. Readings are script in hand, actors in chairs, reading dramatically. Each play is about 15 minutes long, so the whole theatrical portion of the evening is less than an hour in length and will be very entertaining, albeit simple. This allows more time for drinking and socializing and us looking sadly at you with our "please sir, can you donate some more?" eyes. Really, how can you say no?

Hope to see many of you there!

सोंधेइम, माय पनिक अत्ताक्क्स, टाइम

2008-03-11T10:53:00.000-07:00

So, here we are in March. Time seems to be an odd combination of slow and quick so far this year, moving in a jerking fashion that occasionally leaves me emotionally nauseous, sometimes gliding with a grace I feel like I haven't really experienced since 2006. Even numbered years seem to often be better ones for me, but this year it's been hard to tell, mostly because I still feel tired all the time. Something I'd be more concerned about if it wasn't for the fact that everyone I know seems to feel tired all the time. It's the age we're living in, I suppose. It's a dark one and I remain a busy boy. And so it is, that I will be tired. One gets tired when one keeps swimming in shark infested waters, holding an egg above their head the whole time.

But so much good stuff is going on. A children's theater troupe out in Dublin (California, not Ireland) is doing a children's play I wrote, and I am writing a ton, working on my fantasy novel seriously for the first time since 2003, and drafting new theater pieces, revising older ones, etc. Planning for THE MONK is coming together nicely and Sean Kelly is now hinting at the possibility of me directing a show of his this summer, something I will seriously consider so long as he can meet my needs as a director and keep me out of the producing role as much as possible. I like Sean's writing and so I'd love to be involved. And I'm pretty sure I'm up to it energy wise. After all, it won't be the overwhelming behemouth that was MIDSUMMER.

Speaking of good plays, I saw some excellent stuff this past weekend. The first was Claire Rice's show that she directed for Thunderbird, SERVE BY EXPIRATION 2. This is the first time I have really really liked a Thunderbird show, and have found it to be excellent theater, and not just vaguely obnoxious. Claire does a good job of keeping her cast and staging tight and focused, and the writing (by Ian Hemenway and Sang S. Kim) was surprisingly astute, observant, and more situationally funny than just the easy profanities and vulgarities I've kind of come to expect from SF Sketch Theater. More importantly, it was all tied together well thematically, with recurring characters linking sketches and ideas, circling around a central idea of how the modern workplace functions and culminating in a view of modern white collar society that is almost dark- and fairly acurate. It was also beautifully short, which is nice when you're an anxious boy like me and you're fretting in your seat half the time.

On Sunday night I got to see Frank Rich and Stephen Sondheim chat together for an hour thanks to a birthday gift from Randy Taradash. If its true that you learn something new every day, what I learned that day Stephen Sondheim thinks GROUNDHOG DAY is a near masterpiece, so much so that he won't even touch it despite having long considered it as material for a musical (the variations on each day in the action being an ideal medium in which to explore variations on a given piece of music). I also learned that he loved the Boy George musical, TABOO, and that he's in talks for new film versions of GYPSY and FOLLIES and INTO THE WOODS. He also downplays his creation of some of musical theater's biggest characters, saying he owes it all to the writers of the books, and that he's really running with their ideas and fleshing them out. I found that interesting, as well as his statement that in his mind, all his shows are going to be hits- and thus it always comes as a bit of a disappointment when they tank, as some of them definitely do, or just don't become runaway successes as few of them ever do. All in all an interesting experience, seeing a genius be so humble- and watching him struggle with his ear mic. Which was just kind of cute.

All in all a good weekend. In the middle of it Cody and I spent all of Saturday together, climbing Corona Heights, eating a lot of food, watching a lot of movies. The spring has arrived and it's welcome. My nervousness seems to have returned a bit, though nowhere comparable to last September/October. I'm heading to the doctor tomorrow, mostly to ask questions, and I've decided to start a regimen of regular massages and hot tub soaks. The frazzled feeling I seem to have is one I'd like to control, but I keep wondering if it's not all just one big "Oh God, I'm turning 30 and I still haven't done everything I wanted." Combined with just enough lower back pain to make me feel winded too easily, to make the muscles in my chest and arms twitch just enough to scare me into thinking I'm having a heart attack, to keep me fidgeting in the chair even during my audience with a genius. But I'm getting through it, and that's what counts. I'm learning to say, "It's just a muscle twitching, and the pins and needles in your face is just the anxiety saying hello, and pay attention, Mr. Sondheim made it to seventy and so will you."

May Your Life Be Good Literature

2008-02-14T10:39:00.001-08:00

In honor of Valentine's Day, these are my top ten places in San Francisco where reality and fantasy blend, and utterly magical things can happen (or did)...

1) TINTAGEL CASTLE aka The Sutro Baths. First taken here by an ex-lover during my first year in San Francisco, the relatively young but surprisingly ancient looking ruins of the Sutro Baths (with their adjacent sea cave) remain hands down my favorite thing in this city- even when the fishy smell becomes slightly overbearing. I have had some amazing sex in the parking lot here and some profoundly beautiful conversations while sitting on the look-out just past the sea cave on a sunny day. I brought my family here when they came to visit and still bring every important out of towner who comes my way. I even once rehearsed a play here, back when No Nude Men was just a No Nude Boy in an art gallery that's now a coffee shop. Where else in the world could I have done all these things?

2) JERUSALEM'S LOT aka The Presidio. You know that famous little Maine town taken over by vampires? Sunnydale without the slayer? That's how I always feel in the Presidio, especially at night. Especially when wandering about in the woods at night and coming across various empty houses. Especially especially when I wander a little too close to the old vet's hospital, which looks like a cross between the Marsten House and the Danvers Lunative Asylum. Wonderfully delicious space to scare the shit out of yourself with someone special. Especially if, like me, your cell phone never seems to work in the Presidio. The rumor that there are wolves now in the Presidio makes it even better.

3) THE SECRET GARDEN aka The Sword and the Rose (85 Carl Street), a tiny magic shop located in Cole Valley where you can buy some ornamental knives, incense, get your palm read (or your cards) and where the question, "what do I need to perform an exorcism?" is taken absolutely seriously. Even when the shop is closed, the garden outside of it is delightfully old school charming, with plenty of ivy and lichen crusted statues of vague Greek dieties. Once got kissed fantastically and tragically here during a spring rainstorm. Just don't ask the staff to tell you what anything is: they expect you to know your dark arts before you walk through the hobbit hole.

4) WEATHERTOP aka Buena Vista Park, specifically the small circular look-out lawn at the top. Fantastic view of like... everything. It is true you have to brave the Buena Visa sex zombies to get there, but if you're a woman this isn't a problem and if you're man just don't make eye contact. Of if you do, just keep walking. They only leave the bushes at night.

5) GLASTONBURY aka Mount Davidson. It's a cliche, I know, but it is pretty cool. And the giant cross is sort of magical, and makes me imagine lines of Monks walking up the trails at dawn (or dusk) for matins (or vespers). Always remember, the cross had meaning before Christ, and is a symbol of the sun and destiny, so you don't have to be Christian to enjoy the benevolent sacredness. You can also just close your eyes and pretend you are there with Sting. Works for me.

6) HILL HOUSE aka The Regency (1209 Sutter Street). One of the most haunted places I have ever been, the old masonic lodge is gorgeous from top to bottom with it's classical erra moldings and turn of the century furnishings. There is a theater on the top floor which is filled with watchful but benevolent spirits- and like thirty handpainted backdrops that depict Heaven and Hell and a plethora of other mythical places. One of my fondest memories of living in this city was the day a friend of mine took me there and I sat in a pool of sunset leaking through the latticed windows and watched as she raised and lowered the masterpieces of art for my delight. The wynching system is very old school- ropes and pulleys accessed by a catwalk and most likely tread by the Phantom of the Opera after night. Which is fine, since whatever is walking around in the kitchens of the Regency is much, much scarier. Not that I've seen anything there, mind you, but if you ever get a chance to hang around "downstairs" you'll know what I mean. Something happened there. Something not very nice.

7) WHITBY aka Kite Hill. Located at the end of Corwin Street, Kite Hill is a grassy little hill top with one of the best views of downtown from a bench that sits all by it's lonesome. The path accross the hill has been worn down so much that unless you are very tall (over 6'2") your feet will swing when you sit down, giving the illusion that you are more or less hanging over the city. Magnificent view of the Bay. The quaintness of the immediate houses and a nearby broken wooden fence creates a ruralness which reminds me of the east coast of England. The bench in specific recalls the point where Lucy and Mina first spot Dracula's ship gliding to shore, and I have thus christened it in their honor.

8) GREEN TOWN aka Douglass Park. Perfect suburban park in a quiet suburban neighborhood (Noe Valley), not far from a school and thus filled with the sounds of kids pretty much 24/7. Fabulous for family watching, particularly in the fall, it reminds me of growing up in a small town in an achingly sweet Ray Bradbury way. Peaceful and safe even at night. You could fall asleep on the grass here and wake up with your wallet in your pocket. Of course you will probably also have five ten year olds staring at you and their parents three seconds from calling the police, so I don't reconmend, but never-the-less a nice, welcoming place to have a cup of coffee or a long talk with an old friend.

9) THE GRAVE OF CINDERELLA'S MOTHER aka A Tree At 17th And Douglass. This little sappling is now a mighty tree that has grown into it's little iron cage- literally- the bars pass through the trunk, which has since burst them open. It's like art, or an act of Divine Nature ("Tree- GROW!"), or someone's really clever (and extremely long-sighted) landscaping gimmick. Regardless, it's just neat, and I'm fairly certain the tree grants wishes.

10) DIANA's GROVE aka The Lavender Dell (Fulton and Stanyan). Where I used to read every afternoon after working at Cole Hardware during that first autumn in San Francisco where I barely knew anybody and was too poor to do anything (but looked fantastic). Almost always empty and homeless person free. Occasional pack of USF kids smoking pot but that just brings home the classical pythia connotations. Looks just like the sort of place fantasy characters go to find out the future. My friend once filmed a scene in a movie there, where she was breaking up with her boyfriend. I used to sit on that bench all the time.

Guest Blog by Nirmala Nataraj

2008-02-13T14:04:00.000-08:00

The Monk is a novel that isn't new to stage adaptations but has pretty much received its curtains with respect to contemporary theatre-goers' more "subtle" proclivities. My part in resuscitating this unduly rebuffed classic began the way many of my creative projects do—two years ago, at the enthusiastic behest of one Stuart Bousel. Shortly after the successful debut of my play, The Book of Genesis: Remastered and Remixed, conceived as a series of comedic vignettes for the San Francisco Theater Festival in 2005, Stuart had a wild idea for another collaboration. Namely, I would write a stage adaptation of Matthew Lewis' The Monk, which is generally touted as the first gothic novel ever written—despite an angry injunction to remove its sales back in 1794 by the priggish authorities.

Folks who know Stuart will understand that it's not mere hyperbole to say he's ridiculously well-read and puts even bookworms like me to shame. His oeuvre has a penchant for reviving both prominent and obscure classics, and this particular piece happens to fall into the latter category. In fact, Stuart may have been a little surprised when I was like, "Oh, Ambrosio (the titular character) is my favorite villain in early modern Western literature! He's the reason I decided to become an English major, much to the chagrin of my duty-bound parents. Swoon!"

Overall, the book—500 rollicking pages of love, sex, theology, ghost stories, and fables of nuns and priests gone wild—is florid, tawdry, perverse, melodramatic, withering in its treatment of the Catholic Church…in short, everything I look for in my literature. So naturally, I told Stuart I'd begin straightaway.

Well, a year and a half and two cross-country moves later, I hadn't done diddly. Originally, the play was supposed to premiere in March of 2006, but it soon became clear that wasn't going to be possible, given my newly bi-coastal status. I actually ended up moving back to SF in 2006, at which time Stuart and I loosely speculated on the next available opportunity for a production of The Monk. For about a year, we played e-mail and phone tag; Stuart displayed an unearthly amount of patience for my procrastination and went about his business while I bobbed and weaved around timing like an aging boxer.
Why did it take me so long to finally get started? Well, because I'm lame, for starters. I'm one of those persnickety, perfectionistic writers who develops a complex at the start of any project. So I basically brooded over the page until May of 2007, when Stuart announced to me that he was at the end of his creative and financial rope with No Nude Men. He'd sunk too much of his own moolah into productions over the last several years, with no external sources of funding, and he was mentally and physically exhausted—understandable, since I don't think he'd ever taken much of a breather between shows. Plus, he was getting paid to direct for other companies, longstanding members of NNM were moving on to other enterprises, and it seemed prudent to make a graceful exit while NNM was still at the top of its game.

When he told me all this, something clicked for me. Stuart—in that sly "no blame, no shame" way of his—said that he'd consider doing The Monk if I had something to show him in a few weeks—potentially for an October show at the Exit. Essentially, Stuart's implied moratorium on NNM is what put the flames under my ass and cranked up the creative velocity. At first, the process was fairly hellish. I'd re-read the text obsessively, then write a page or two of script, only to say fuck this and delete all of it and curse the muses to quite dramatic effect…best done to the accompaniment of Mahler. It gradually became easier as I went along. Over about three weeks, I sat at my computer for eight hours at a stretch—listening to Bach's violin concertos and medieval Latin ladymasses while drinking lots of Zinfandel and drunk-dialing my poor bemused friends.
So with a little prodding from Stuart (daily e-mails checking on my progress—I don't think he quite believed I'd make the deadline) and a couple fog and incense-filled visions of the Wandering Jew and Bleeding Nun (who actually wrote whole pages of dialogue for me, bless their infernal souls!), I plodded through the process pretty gracefully, if I do say so myself. The result is pretty much faithful to the text (after all, I usually relish the opportunity to use archaic words in a sentence), with a healthy dollop of creative license splashed in to make it all less literary and more stagey. My primary source was Matthew Lewis' novel, but I took it upon myself to do a little research into torture tactics circa the Spanish Inquisition, and other topics that I thought would be ideal for the provision of nice little details…clothing styles, sources of entertainment, and the like. I'm sure the final manuscript isn't exactly historically spot-on, but then again, you can't really demerit Lewis' crazy fantasia on the basis of inaccuracy. I think Lewis would give the adapted version of The Monk his blessings—it's sexy, fiery, mysterious, and retains the punitive air that I think he had always intended—more dominatrix than moralist.

Unfortunately, Stuart and I decided that an October 2007 production just wouldn't be possible, because the show was TOO BIG. It would need costumes, publicity, and frankly, a little more conciseness (my initial version clocked in to just under three hours)—not to mention time to suss out all the conceptual kinks. So we'd give it the ministration it deserved and save it for 2008, which would also allow us plenty of time to collect donations and raise the money necessary to create a fabulous red-letter production.

Now that the writing bit is over, the good part begins. At this point, I'm pretty much sitting pretty and deferring to Stuart's vision, which—to my utter delight—includes elements of the medieval mystery play, the 16th century masque, and commedia dell'arte pageantry. Who could say no to all that?

I always thought it would be nice to be a bona fide playwright, but I never really imagined myself penning tales about venal monks and damsels in distress, much less adaptations of all that stuff. But as little as I know about liturgical tropes or even the Spanish Inquisition (aside from that Mel Brooks ditty), devising a script for The Monk was perhaps the most fun and trying and scary and tumultuous and exhilarating writing experience I've had so far. I hope it convinces Stuart to share his own directorial talent with the NNM community just a little longer, as I imagine that future collaborations are definitely in the works…

MONK IT UP

2008-02-08T06:57:00.001-08:00

So, for those of you out there who are myspace people, my incoming production of the Nirmala Nataraj adaptation of Matthew Lewis's novel THE MONK began its early marketing campaign this past Ash Wednesday. The URL is:

http://www.myspace.com/ambrosioandmatilda

Please friend us, leave comments and such... that's how these things work.

And yeah, I feel a little strange marketing something before I have even finished casting it, but this is how we baby step into the bigger theater world, I suppose. But when a friend of mine said, "I can't wait to see it" it was kind of funny to hear myself saying, "Yeah, me too. I wonder who will be in it."

Interesting Conversation With Alison Luterman

2008-01-25T13:28:00.000-08:00

So, I recently passed a draft of my play, GAY PORN WRITERS AND THE WOMEN WHO LOVE THEM to San Francisco Bay Area playwright and poet Alison Luterman, who always manages to illicit interesting stuff from me with her critiques. Now, granted, you may not be as into the minutia of my psyche as much as I am (in fact, I rather hope you are not) but, just in case you ever wanted to listen to me go on and on about myself, my writing, my process and so on... here it is, happily captured on e-mail.

Sorry it took me so long to get back to you on this play. I read it and loved it, especially when the actors break the fourth wall and speak about themselves to the audience--very Terrence McNally--you do it effectively and it's some of my favorite writing in the play.

Hmmmm... Not sure how I feel about that. I kind of hate Terrence McNally. But I'll take the compliment since it worked for you. :-)

I like the subtlety of the inter-relationships, especially the shades of gray in the friendships and the depiction of a world where gay and straight and bi people speak honestly and have areas of commonality as well as areas they don't share. It reflects my experience in a way I haven't seen it reflected on stage before. Maybe it's a Bay Area thang.

Agreed... the hardest thing to find here, I think, is depictions of sex and romance and relationships that even remotely approaches real life. Most plays seem to either sensationalize these subjects and over-sex/dramatize it, or they funny it up and trivialize it without saying anything new. Beyond that, the Bay Area theater scene is, oddly, very dichotomized between gays and straights, and most gay theater seems to promote the negative stereotype of gays and gay romance (that it's easy, that it's all a party, or the reverse, that it's all ridiculously dire and ground breaking/edgy) while also promoting a negative image of straights (they are stupid, intolerant, bad dressers, fools, etc.). In the end, they mostly seem to be scared of just letting love and sex be what they are for most of: unbearably important, but also not the only thing in our lives. I have all sorts of theories as to why this seems to be the way of things out here, but in a nutshell, I think it's because we live in such a bubble. This play was originally written (draft 1) in Tucson, and more or less took place in Portland in my head, both places which I think have a more laid back, and thus more integrated, gay scene. As opposed to here, where I'm constantly astounded by how many gay men I know who have no female friends, let alone straight male friends. My only truly bisexual friend here has constantly lamented to me how rejected he feels by both communities, something I find really interesting, as he's undeniably hot and a great kisser (for the record). Anyway, the major gay companies in town often seem to pander to this general one-sidedness by frequently doing shows in which gays seem to exist in a world without straights, or at best, include straight women, either a mom or an ex-wife/girlfriend, usually. Straight men (if present at all) seem to often be depicted as potential sexual conquests, threats or again, family members, usually ones struggling with their son/father/brother being gay. Rarely are functional, platonic relationships between gays and straights depicted here, and I've always wondered why, as I think in this day and age, the lines between the communities have blurred for a good many people. Beyond that, Because my own coming out story is pretty boring (I said I was gay, everyone shrugged and moved on) I have never found them terribly interesting, and one of my goals as a writer/director is to present more stories about homosexuals outside of the coming out genre (which, along with HIV, seems to be the principal subject matter of most gay plays) and as participants in larger communities and community issues. That said, this is by far the gayest play I have ever written, and the only one that discusses homosexuality as a social issue. And honestly, this is about as intense as I want that dicussion to be. Anything more, and I'd probably find it maudlin and boring because, lucky for me, I don't really relate to non-integrated gay characters. Anyway, I'm glad it worked for you as a depiction of that integrated sexuality was one of the goals of the play.

Critiques: the bar Mitzvah scene reads too ham-handed in the stereotyping of Agnes and Olivia. I'm not offended, it just doesn't have the same nuance and delicacy as the way you play with, explore and deflate stereotypes about gay culture. It reads as if the scene were from a different play. What about their inner lives? Wouldn't it be cool to give them one?

I hear you. I go back and forth on these characters. I actually based them off my real life relatives, so I will say that for the record, these women exist and they're real, but I also agree: I find the moment a bit hamfisted. Response has been mixed: some people love them, some people hate them. I have no desire to give them inner monologues because I don't see them as important enough for that (they're just there to provide context for Rebecca) but I do wonder if they come off as too flat. That said, I have more or less justified them in my head because they stand in for the element of all stereotypes that is true, and I think their one scene is balanced by Rebecca being so complex and Esther and Doug both countering the typical Jewish stereotype (one reader actually told me he didn't believe Esther was Jewish because, "no Jewish woman ever has been that sexy and that confident in her own sexiness"- what the hell does that mean?). There are other stereotypes present (Silvia, Toro, Hamish) so I figure it more or less balances itself out and helps keep the play in the realm of comedy (plus making the central characters more relateable by contrast) so I figure it all balances itself out. But those caveats aside, I keep tinkering with the scene, trying to play it down a bit more without loosing the sense of how oppressive Rebecca finds her family.

L'il sis Cara June seems too articulate when we first meet her--she sounds exactly like the late-twenty-somethings and thirty-somethings. In fact, this is a bit of a weakness in the whole play--the voices blend into each other. I think you can get away with this with the gang who are all the same age and same culture--although more differentiation would allow each character to "pop" more; but it would be great if her speech could indicate in some way that she is still a teen. (I wasn't bothered by this so much in later scenes with her, it was only initially.)

It's funny, but I actually really deeply subscribe to the school of "teens don't talk differently from adults, they just sometimes don't articulate themselves as well". I kind of abhor lingo, too, and always find it false in movies and television (like, say, JUNO). That said, I have known some really articulate and well-spoken teens and Cara is, basically, my sister (the moment where she dismisses Bryon in her first scene is directly quoted from my sister). She is also, it's stated early on, not "typical", and in her first scene she is "in her element", holding court as it were. In her final scene, you may note, her conduct is much more "young" and I think this is reflected both in her vernacular ("Because why?" being my personal favorite "youthism") and in the wayward emotional state of the character. But again, the point of the character is that there is a dichotomy between her life experience and her intelligence: she thinks she is much more grown up than she is. When the two things collide, like in her final scene, she becomes a kid again, albeit a bright one and that's probably why she sounds more like one too.

(In general, in your playwriting, which is so superb, I'd love to see you delve more into finding voices that are not just intelligent, witty self-conscious sophisticated. I'd love to see you do a character who was uneducated, or foreign, or I don't know--different in some way.)

Well, before you make a sweeping generalization, I should point out you've only read two of my plays, but I will conceed that, generally speaking, I mostly write intelligent people. I do think, and have been commended on having, many distinct character voices and personalities- I think this is very evident in MATHEW, for instance, where all the characters are intelligent and self-aware (as they would have to be in a play of monologues), but hardly interchangeable or without developed personalities and backgrounds, and developed vernaculars (Simon's short, detail devoid sentences vs. Mathew's eloquent, rambling prose; Brian's southern coloquilisms vs. Claire's precise language vs. Ruth's ingratiating platitudes). Also, in my genre plays (I write a lot of phantasmagoric plays and stuff based on history) different class levels and so forth are reflected depending on the story I'm telling but yeah, for this play, the central characters are all more or less from the same world and that's kind of the point. Their world is not only small: it's terribly insular. They all know each other too well, sometimes to the point of unwittingly quoting one another (Becky and Bryon do this all the time, but then, the point is, they are reflections of each other) and they're left intentionally kind of unfinished because the audience is asked to relate to them. With this play, I'm less interested in presenting the audience with "my really cool characters" so much as asking them to see themselves in the characters. Personally, in slice of life comedy, I think this is better, because it also gives the actors more room to move and create distinctions for the characters, rather than having me hand it all to them. To me, that's the point of a play as opposed to, say, a novel.

But yeah, you're right, I do write a lot about smart, self-aware people. Those are the people that interest me in the end. And for better or worse it's what I know. And I totally believe in writing what you know (while also making everything up). I'm an esoteric writer and my voice is my hallmark. I mean, I just wrote a play about 19th century vampire hunters living in the Swiss Alps. In mood, tone, subject matter it's very "different" and the characters are all from different countries... but the play is still obviously by me. And while there are many characters who are not the typical Stuart figures (there is a housemaid, a vampire prostitute, an aging provincial inkeeper, his moody and withdrawn son) the principal characters of Ned and Hermia are still educated, articulate wits with a hyper self-awareness. Even my two sort of famously dumb characters, Claudia and Gilbert (a super model and a football player, respectively) in my play SPEAK TO ME are still amazingly self-aware. But to me, people are most interesting when they have some ability to step outside themselves, and characters are most interesting when they can reflect on their own role in a drama. So, that's how I tend to write my significant figures, regardless of their profession, background, etc.

The issue of Bryon passing for straight in order to get his book published doesn't seem to have any consequences. He lets Sylvia have her assumption, the book comes out and that's it. It doesn't say whether she ever finds out, or whether there's ever anything to pay for this small deal with the devil that he's struck. I'd love at least a little speech from him about how he fels about passing, has he ever passed before, when was the last time he was not out--high school? Does it bring up old feelings/memories for him to be back in that position again? Does it make him vulnerable in a way he doesn't expect (rather than the ways in which he's sort of developed his vulnerability as a defence?)

You're right, this does need to be developed more. To me, it's never really about the book (the irony being, he tells Silvia, she finds out, she doesn't care) as it is about Bryon's own reluctance to just chill out and stop being such a petulant, put-upon brat who keeps scapegoating women. The whole point is that Silvia doesn't have a problem, BRYON has a problem... but yeah, that could be more evident. And it's probably as simple as having Bryon talk about what happens when he tells Silvia. Or something. Anyway, I'll figure it out. Your questions here all raise good points because while there is no signifigance to Bryon's "lie" in the real world, it's clearly signifigant to the character and there needs to be more resolution to that.

I loved the ending--a little bittersweet. I love it that Rebecca gets to have true love in the end. I love the modulated note of Bryon and Patrick's relationship--the acknowledgement of how complex and ever-shifting this thing we call relationship is. And I love the friendships with Maria and Neil, and the hint of ambiguity there.

Thanks. I tend to have bittersweet endings. The original draft was far too neat. Everyone ended up with someone. It was too pat. To me, the best moment is Luke telling Bryon he better be invited to his wedding... to someone else. So they still end up together, but not as they may have imagined or Bryon may have hoped. To me, that's life.

I Wrote Barbara Boxer An E-Mail Today...

2008-01-24T10:18:00.000-08:00

...asking her to help support legislation that would put more money into infectious disease research and antibiotic development. This is my way of trying to feel like I'm more actively involved in a government which rarely seems to care about the people of this nation. Perhaps that is bleak, but between the staph infection hooplah and the recent declaration of yet another recession (accompanied by the usual photos of weeping stock brokers), I'm just feeling a bit bleak lately. Well, that and I started trying to figure out my budget today. Ironic to realize that, while I work for the travel industry, I won't be doing any traveling this year. Sigh. This is what it means to tighten the belt.

New Year

2008-01-19T06:57:00.000-08:00

It's been a while I know, but things have been busy. 2008 has gotten off with a bang and, happily, seems to be starting out on a much more solid foot than 2007 did, with projects on the horizon but not immediately in my face and lots going on in the social end of things. Spent this last week suffering from the same flu everyone else seems to have had but on the plus side it gave me a couple of days to hang out at home and finally get the first draft of VAMPIRE HUNTERS SUPPORT GROUP done. I don't know how good it is, mind you, but it's there and probably better than I think. Though maybe not. It was one of those scripts that was sort of writing itself as it went, the dialogue unfolding the plot and character arcs to me at about the same time as it would be to the audience (which is probably not good, as I'm nominally supposed to have a plan here, being the uber-narrator). Still, I felt... pleased when I was done. Considering the earliest form of the idea first emerged during traffic school back in like... 1996... this i actually kind of amazing to be able to look at a pile of paper and say, "That's a play."

Having a reading for the latest draft of GAY PORN WRITERS on Thursday. The nice thing about not having a show in production right now is that I'm getting caught up on other projects. GAY PORN WRITERS is almost to the point where I can start sending it out and I need to get on that, and continuing to promote other work. There is whispers of JASON AND THE ARGONUTS getting done in Dublin in March, but I have learned never to take any possible production too seriously until a check comes in. But I'd like to see stuff besides my kids stuff start getting picked up this year. And yeah, I know, what playwright wouldn't?

On a directing note, Nirmala and I are pushing ahead with THE MONK and I'm starting to get really excited about it as my concept gels and I realized yesterday how I wanted to direct and cast the piece. The theater we're using is so small, the story so epic, at first I was worried I wouldn't be able to make them mesh, and now I realize I know exactly how it has to be and it's just a matter of finding the right ten actors. The show feels very exciting to me, very unique and potentially quite disturbing. I have the same early vibes that I had during the previous No Nude Men Golden Age (Phaedra, Love's Labor's Lost, Hamlet) and for now I'm just going to trust that (and not give into the crazy feelings like, "Oh my God, what if someone else does THE MONK before I do!") and begin the always nerve-wracking process of casting. Rehearsals don't start until August but I want the perfect people for this show and so I've started showing the script as of yesterday. We'll see what people think and if they share my enthusiasm.

So there we go... not quite three weeks in yet. Kind of wondering if we'll get more rain this winter. It already feels like spring.

My Review of Tim Burton's SWEENEY TODD

2007-12-20T10:56:00.000-08:00

Okay, so I saw an advance screening last night and I have to admit my reactions are mixed. Let me preface everything with saying that I'm not a huge Burton fan, I am a huge Sondheim fan, but in neither case am I fanatical: I think both men are capable of interesting and startling work, and both are capable of being quiet disappointing, if not outright bad on occasion. "Sweeney Todd" in particular is my favorite musical, and arguably one of my favorite stage shows period, so I did also have high hopes, and that should be taken into consideration, but that said I've seen five very different stage productions of it (including the minimalist John Doyle version) and I've found something to like about all of them, but only found one (ironically a black box version I saw in Portland) truly "flawless" from top to bottom.

Of course, in theater, flaws are more acceptable and sometimes actually ad to a performance. In film, I'm a bit less forgiving, particularly of large and expensive, lavish films like this one, because with all this money and backing you really have no excuse to not be perfect, but perhaps its niave to take that tack, and either way, it's all subjective in the end: I come at everything with my own vision, my own experience and my own desires, and in this case especially, I had some idea of what it was "supposed to be."

So, all caveats aside, it's a good movie. Is it the best movie of the year? No. Is it the best "Sweeney Todd" ever? No. But is it an enjoyable film: Yes. Would I reconmend it: Yes. Do I hope that anyone who sees this film likes it more than the stage show: I sincerely hope not. Why? Well, because it's not a great treatment of the text, and in the effort to make a mainstream film, a lot of good stuff was sacrificed. And while I do appreciate that sometimes this happens in an attempt to take something from one medium and put it in another, I do think better choices could have been made to make a better movie, even though I do think the film that was made is nothing to be dismissed lightly.

So for me, here's what works and what doesn't work:

Johnny Depp- he's okay. He's not amazing. It's neither his best work, nor his most forgetable, but he poses more than he acts, in my opinion, and while he fills the Sweeney shoes adequately he doesn't run with them as I would have liked and expected him to do. He also can't sing the songs more than passably. He's on key, but there's no power to his vocals, and there are key moments he drops the ball on. He doesn't suck by any means and he doesn't detract from the material, he just doesn't bring anything fresh or exciting to it. It never comes alive in him and this is a role that should tear through the audience. This is a role that should scare you because you can see it in yourself, all the rage, all the pain, all the unimaginable loss. Johnny is Johnny and so it's good, but it's not amazing. He feels like a shadow of an icon; an echo of an actor inside a titanic role.

Helena Bonham Carter- I'm a fan, so keep that in mind, but I actually think she does better with her part that Johnny does with his. She makes some exciting new choices with the character, she acts beautifully and her comic timing is wonderful. Her singing leaves something to be desired, not for its airiness but for its lack of expression. Without the visuals of the film, without the swelling of the music, I don't know that you would get the emotional gist of what she's singing about and that doesn't work for me. The power of musicals is the ability to transcend emotional truths and take emotional moments to new expressive heights and while Helena does it on the screen she doesn't do it in her voice. It's like the audio equivalent of watching someone who smiles with their mouth but not with their eyes: it might be a pretty smile, but it doesn't ring true.

Timothy Spall and Alan Rickman do much better with their roles, though I think the Judge's "Johanna" was an unfortunate cut. I understand why they made it, but without it the Judge feels less creepy and also less complex: his lust for Johanna is torturous for him, like all over-zealous people he has acheived that state because he secretly hates himself and Rickman is such a good actor but he doesn't have the material and screen time to convey all that and I think that's partly because of the loss of his song. In Sondheim, so much of the characters are conveyed in the songs and every cut you make is more likely than not to result in a flattening of a personality or a loss of a dimension. This is really apparent in regards to Johanna, who is reduced to very little more than a prop.

Now, granted, I happen to love Johanna. In the best production of Sweeney I ever saw, the actress who played this part really brought home the tragedy of this character, and "Green Finch and Linnet Bird" was both haunting and sad (as it is in this film, albeit, severely cut) and "Kiss Me" came off not a silly but as a desperate person throwing her fate into the hands of man who, for all she knows, could be just one more jailer- but at least he appears to be a kind one. Jayne, to her credit, does a good job. She sings well, she looks beautiful, and the five lines of dialogue she's given allow her to show some pathos and intelligence: she knows the happy ending is not going to be as simple as Anthony thinks it, and I applaud them for not playing the character as a ninny, which I have seen far too often (Betsy Jocelyn being the infamous perp in this regards). I just wish she had more to do and more to sing, and I wonder if the ten minutes that adding back part of the Judge's "Johanna" and a bit more of her material (perhaps the middle verse of "Green Finch" with its echoes of screaming, or the first part of "Kiss Me" with she and Anthony desperately hatching impossible plans) would have really brought the film down. On the contrary I think it would have made for a better film, with some great visual cinematic possibilities and two more fleshed out characters. But character developement is, in my opinion, Burton's Achilles Heel and where he usually drops the ball: he works better with archetypes than he does with three dimensional personalities, which is why his best work is fairy tale based ("Edward Scissorhands", "Corpse Bride", "Batman") and not content/character driven.

The only real disaster in this movie is Anthony, who is horribly horribly miscast. Now, I have already bantered about how I think he looks too girly for the role, in a time when men in his profession would have been burly, to say the least, but aside from my personal aesthetic, he just isn't a good actor. Anthony is a tough role. He is almost as unqualified good as the Beadle is unqualified evil, and I've seen few actors who can pull off the part without coming off as cheesey. The best I've seen make the character niave, the kind of blind good that doesn't think before it acts, i.e. the kind of guy who will free a girl from a prison, without first thinking how she will then survive in a society where women usually needed men to provide for and protect them unless they were a queen or a widow or an heiress with the luck of a good education (and Johanna is none of these things, as clever and pretty as she is). Jamie doesn't come off as niave so much as young, far too young, and not only is he not believable as a sailor, he's not really believable as a hero either- he just seems too weak in body and spirit to have convictions, and what Anthony needs is conviction. His big song, "Johanna" is a sea ballad of broiling strings and drums, a vow to assert his strength over the situation, but Jamie's voice is American Idol pretty and lacks both power and expression of the nature that makes you think, "He can do this!" Instead, I found myself thinking, "Johanna, wait for the next hero. He'll be better at this and probably knows how to punch someone." Beyond that, Jamie's just not a good actor: his facial expressions are ridiculously amateur, mugging his way through everything and he alone comes off as the "musical theater" person, in the bad way.

The best performances in the film are Laura Michelle Kelly and Ed Sanders. The former doesn't have as much screen time as she should, but I understand the nature of her material cuts and I more or less approve because it helps build the power of the revelation of her true identity. She's luminous in the silent scenes and she's wonderfully creepy in the singing moments, the best voice, the best technique and, I think, Burton's triumph as far as reconceiving the character: it is here that he is most successful in taking the stage figure and doing something new with it and I applaud him for making the first truly unsettling beggar woman I have ever seen. As for Ed Sanders, he's adorable and he sings well and yes, he's a bit precious, but it works and it brings a lot out of Helena Bonham Carter and I liked their relationship and felt it was more developed than I've seen in any stage production. Another point for Burton.

Sacha Baron Cohen was in this movie. Shrug. Pirelli is the only part of the show I usually kind of daydream through. Same here. The tea kettle moment was a nice touch though.

Well, so, now, having dissected the cast what else is there? Moments that really worked, moments that didn't. "Worst Pies in London" did for me; "God That's Good," didn't- I could barely tell what's going on and wondered if it was worse for people who didn't know the song. Frankly, if there was a song to cut, that was the song, because it could easily have been conveyed in some dialogue. Instead, we get a mess of pastiche too choppy to follow. "Jersey Girl" did it better. The intrumental ballad (and its many reprises) was a blessing and I completely support it. In this vision of the material it would have been too stagey and the power of the ballad has always been more in the music than the lyrics for me. "A Little Priest" also really worked for me, though I missed the comic asides and I wasn't sure why they were gone. It didn't take away from the movie, but I do think it could have added much to it, offering a bit more connection between Sweeney and Mrs. Lovett, making their tragedy more deep in its final moments. Helena in flames was great, though it took me back to Frankenstein for a moment, maybe intentionally. The first 2/3rds of the film felt better paced than the final third, which seemed to suddenly kick into hypergear, and felt a little too rushed at the loss of tension: the stage play definitely wins out here with it's sense of suspense. The final image of Benjamin and Lucy was haunting and stylized and lovely, and a good moment to end on, with a tougher Toby working for me in this film. Ironically, I believed Ed Sanders as an executioner much more than I believed Jamie as a hero.

In sum: the strength of this movie: the visual style (Tim Burton's real strength), the orchestrations (the music has never sounded better), the performances in general, the pacing for the first two thirds. The weakness: Anthony, the singing for the two leads, the flattening of some of the characters and the pacing of the final third of the film. But with the exception of the pacing and Anthony, who is bad by anyone's standards, I should hope, I don't know that the other faults would bother someone who isn't familiar with the material, because they might not know there is more to the Judge and Johanna's characters, and they might not know that Sweeney's songs can be utterly gut-wrenching when sung with a full baritone. The total: A good movie, worth seeing, that will hopefully help win people over to a masterpiece of theater that, when done right, is much better.

P.S. The soundtrack is good, but if you really like this material, the original Broadway cast recording remains the best- and most complete- that I know of. Put it on in your car and go driving down some empty rodes late at night. That's how I first heard it, and it both scared me to death and made me cry.

The Great Gay Debate

2007-12-07T15:53:00.001-08:00

So, I spent a portion of today having an online debate with a pair of gay men who were, like me, coasting around the posting board for THE GOLDEN COMPASS, which is the center of a giant religious debate, even on the never-terribly-savvy realm of IMDB. At one point, our particular thread turned to a discussion of gay culture that I felt a need to be abnormally articulate on and, almost by accident, found myself enough engaged by to want to preserve the conversation. Thus, I have transferred it here, for posterity. Interestingly enough, shortly after I did, the original poster appears to have destroyed the thread... I almost wonder if it's because my points were starting to hit a little too close to home. Anyway, for your enjoyment... here is our debate...

POSTER: I challenge everyone to say one bad thing about homosexuals that is true.

ME: um... we're terrible at long term commitment, don't value intelligence and individuality because its threatening to our current social need to be homogenous, often have severe self-loathing issues, and are usually very judgmental of others particularly in regards to income, fashion, bodies and taste? oh, wait... is that just too honest for everybody?

POSTER: Have you been reading the membership requirements for the Young Republicans? That Club is waaaay too 20th century to even be around any more.

ME: No, I've just been dating men for the last 11 years but hey- we all see our own version of it, huh? I hardly mean to say that all gay men are like what I describe, but certainly "gay culture" (a dubious concept to begin with) as a whole could stand to be criticized on the above points. Which doesn't mean straight culture doesn't have its share of flaws too, just means nobody is above reproach based on who they chose to have sex with, period. And by the by, calling me a republican because I don't carte blanche wave my rainbow flag, just proves my point. :-)

POSTER: I understand your point but Gay culture is as varied as any other on the planet.

ME: Yes, but like every other culture, the majority of the culture subscribes to a certain mentality, image, etc. That's how "culture" happens and is gleaned, from the similarities of a group. All culture is, is stereotype spun to sound like an educated assessment instead of a derogatory put down. But any cultural anthropologist worth his or her salt will tell you, stereotypes arise out of truths and cultural norms: and the current, commonly accepted and touted gay American culture, by gays, is one that is fiercely anti-dissention, anti-individuality, anti-intelligence, anti-responsibility and anti-integration with heterosexuals. Which I find sad, and I hope it changes. And if you don't agree, well, I'm going to spin that as you've already found that awesome social paradise I hope we all get to live in someday- but I certainly haven’t and I don’t think most of us, gay or straight, have.

POSTER: So, it's possible that other people that are not gay can do those things. That means that it's not because of being gay, it's because of something else.

ME: Of course. I never said we cornered the market on undesirable personality traits. I just meant that people could say these things about the current gay culture that most gays profess to be a part of, and they would be correct. Again, I sight gay pop culture as being representative of gays or how many gays would like to be represented, but certainly not the only way of being gay or indicative of the idea that all gays are like this. And again, my perspective is affected by being gay and living in the USA, in San Francisco no less... I found the gays of New Zealand and Australia, for instance, to be much more laid back, open-minded, less class conscious and less hetero-exclusive. So keep all that in mind and take what I say with a grain of salt. The point is: no one is above reproach because they are gay just as no one deserves to be kicked because they are gay. But gay culture is a social question, not a biological one; biologically speaking, you are correct: there is nothing bad you can say about gays that is true. But culturally speaking, we do seem to be in a period of history where gays are against dissention in the ranks, likely because we are oppressed and are insecure about anything that weakens our already precarious social position- this often happens with any minority, and is understandable, thought not admirable and it should and must change. Furthermore, we also seem to be in a period of embracing extreme shallowness as a somehow attractive trait- but that is obvious in other sects of people too- shallowness as a whole seems to have returned as a cultural norm and gays have just put their own spin on it, which is tragic but perhaps nothing we can be blamed for: after all, when in Rome, right? Finally, from a psychological perspective, we are more prone to both eating and substance disorders than any other social group in modern America... but that's probably because we are also persecuted, so that can hardly be blamed on us. But it is true, and not a good thing, and something I wish we paid more attention to rather than ignoring or, worse, occasionally lionizing through circuit culture, beauty contests, etc.

POSTER: And can you really know that that's because you're gay?

ME: All I can really know is my own perspective on things. And yes, as a gay male living in the United Sates, I would say that there are a number of things about the current popular gay culture that are terrible, or at the least, unattractive and undesirable. Log into gay.com and read some articles if you want proof of how we are often our own worst enemy, especially when it comes down to matters of self-representation. For the most part, our websites and publications, by our community and for our community, are not ones that cast us as responsible, accepting, diverse, tolerant, intellectual, accomplished or basically anything but insatiable party animals looking to dull our senses, bare our asses and bury our heads on any issue so long as it doesn’t threaten our good times.

Sondheim said it best...

2007-11-14T11:06:00.001-08:00

Perpetual anticipation is good for the soul
But it's bad for the heart.
It's very good for practicing self-control,
It's very good for morals, but bad for morale.
It's very bad.
It can lead to going quite mad.
It's very good for reserve and learning to do what one should.
It's very good.
Perpetual anticipation's a delicate art,
Playing a role,
Aching to start,
Keeping control
While falling apart.
Perpetual anticipation is good for the soul
But it's bad for the heart.

My Horroscope Says...

2007-11-09T10:44:00.000-08:00

...something I have been waiting for is about to happen, and that I have to let go of a few more things yet to make room for it. Which is interesting, as that sort of seems to be the theme of this year for me and a lot of people (but the rest of them can write their own blogs, so let's just talk about me), especially since I got back from Canada.

Since the return I have been most taken up with getting MATHEW 33:6's workshop up and running, then guiding it through its run, which ends this weekend to, happily, full houses- as I predicted, audiences have improved in numbers since Halloween, or maybe it was just because of all the crying I was doing on this blog. The show is mostly about letting go, of people, of the past, of beliefs and preconceptions about things we can't possibly know the truth about, but interestingly enough, besides a mediocre attendance and some early drama involving a sick actor, this has been one of the most low-key and painless production processes ever... and so while I've been steeped in the subject matter, I haven't been overwhelmed by it. In fact, it's been kind of interesting to realize how distant I feel from it all.

I've also been doing a lot of house-cleaning, selling a lot of old books in particular. Nothing too precious, of course, the heirlooms and special gifts and much beloved volumes are all still present, but I've dumped easily 200 books in the last month and anyone who knows me knows that this is a rather big deal, as hoarding books is a specialty of mine. But it's sometimes liberating to get rid of a lot of stuff that you really don't want or need, and the process of sorting the "stays" from the "gos" is actually really theraputic, as it gives me a chance to categorize my emotions with easy, tangible signifiers (the books). And having now reached a point where I've managed to completely clear one whole shelf of my closet, I do relish the sense of accomplishment, even if I have had one or two moments of reaching for something I no longer own. But that was to be expected, I suppose, and in both cases the missing book is not really something I miss. And as for all the books I would miss if they were to vanish... well, I appreciate them all the more now, as they form the bulk of my collection, not just a part of it. One of the things I've learned over the years is that it's better to have a few really precious things than lots of not terribly important stuff. It makes one feel, paradoxically, lighter and yet more grounded.

Sometimes we go through the same process with people. This past Wednesday I had my 29th birthday party and I got to see a lot of my good friends all in one room. Of course, there were some key people missing... there always are, and probably always will be... but there is something comforting about being able to look around a room and know everybody in it, and know why you love them. This year I even managed to refrain from making any long speeches, because it was just so nice seeing everyone standing around chatting and having a good time without me. I realized how comfortable all my friends are in my home. And that's something to be proud of.

You Gotta Watch That Blog!

2007-10-26T09:12:00.000-07:00

Something that always astounds me is discovering people actually read this thing, a fact I was reminded of this past Friday when a friend came up to me at the show and said he'd read about me mourning the lack of thunderous parades for MATHEW 33:6's current work-shop. He, of course, re-iterated the point that there are many theater companies in this town who would love to have 30+ people a night in their audience and I couldn't really argue with him since he belongs to one of them. Nothing like someone else in this show-business thing to help put your own moans and groans back into perspective.

That said, I did tell the Exit yesterday that I would be passing on the October 2008 dates I was originally looking at. The fact is, I just don't have the production capital right now because this year, despite many a miraculous success by the skin of our teeth, has been costly and not terribly lucrative, with the shows just barely breaking even. Beyond that, for the ten thousandth time, I kind of just need to rest. Of course, rest for me (as Lisa Fowle and I discussed over the phone last night) often entails being rather busy by most people's standards and so it's all relative... but I'll know the difference. The point is, actually taking the step to give up my dates in 2008 is kind of akin to an alcoholic finally agreeing to participate in a treatment program. I mean sure, my addiction is more beneficial to society (I hope) but this year it's arguable that it might be just as detrimental to my health. And I have to keep reminding myself, I'm not giving up, just regrouping and re-approaching the whole life in the arts things. And declaring myself a free agent, which is in the spirit of the whole nucleus behind No Nude Men in the first place: that all of us could leave at any time, including me.

In other news, I did just finish the first full draft of GAY PORN WRITERS AND THE WOMEN WHO LOVE THEM, which started as a revision of my 2001 movie script by the same name and has actually turned into such a heavy overhauling in its transition to stage that it's barely recognizable after the first ten pages or so. I'm still putting in a few cursory revisions but as of this writing it's turned out to be a fairly cute and cutting little rom-com that I could totally see a smarter, younger (and hipper) gay theater company doing (now the trick is, where do I find one of those?). I'm also slowly pushing out the first act of THE VAMPIRE HUNTERS' SUPPORT GROUP, which is just taking longer because I have to put more thought into it, and though the pace of my life is slacking, having the show on weekends still cuts into my time and makes it hard to concentrate on the script. I'd like to have a first draft done on this one by the end of the year, though, and I'm sure its doable. Particularly if I get some really concentrated work time, say over Thanksgiving break, though that may also be when I get caught up on website updates, which I am sorely behind on. And then, of course, there is always THE UNNAMED PLAY lurking in the back of my head that has been brewing (and frightening me) for years now... that's coming soon too. It's going to be a productive winter.

As The Season Turns...

2007-10-19T14:44:00.000-07:00

...and we head into the second weekend of MATHEW 33:06 I find myself doing a lot of thinking, gearing up for a period of rest from producing and, possibly (unless someone commissions or hires me) directing as well. It is harder, sometimes, to let go of all your responsibilities than it is to keep on carrying them, even if you are tired, even if you are fully aware that the time has come to do so.

So, though I have often said that No Nude Men's time is limited, it does seem that we have, in fact, reached another period of hiatus, to commence when MATHEW 33:06 closes and for an indefinite time. The lackluster reception of this show cements what has been a difficult year for the company (karmic, perhaps, after the surreal success of the last two years?) and I feel no real sadness, just my vague over-achiever complex playing tricks on me, whispering that to move in a different direction is somehow to "give up" even though it isn't- but it does feel that way sometimes, and I know the right people know what I mean.

MATHEW 33:06 has been playing to small but very supportive houses and I am by no means throwing in the towel on it being a success yet (a success is measured by your ability to touch someone, not by the number your touch, in my opinion) but the fact is, in this last year, practical concerns have reared their head and we just don't seem to be garnering the press support or the public support we once had... and the coffers are running dry. And I must say, it is disappointing. I had been warned that the press in San Francisco bites only occasionally and there are a number of people who have chided me for complaining that I have been abnormally lucky and gotten more attention than most but it feels like here we are, doing a really interesting and serious peace... and the crickets are chirping. It makes me sad and disappoints me. I guess, after this year of hard work, incredible success (MIDSUMMER) and unlikely magic tricks (CERBERUS BARKING) I just wanted more and expected more. Which is always dangerous in this business, of course, and I know that and I chastise my sour grapes ass... but it does lead me to think, yes, now really is the time to back away for a while. I've exhausted this way of doing things and while it would have been nice to end on a bang, we may be ending on a soft and gentle note instead. Which isn't a bad thing, per se, so I am working to accept and love it, however it all turns out when this show closes four weeks from today.

This is a good show and a nice note to close on for a while. And while I'm sad to see myself moving past No Nude Men, I am also interested in seeing what I do next. Like Simone at the end of LOVE EGOS ALTERNATIVE ROCK. I wrote that too.

Greetings From Mathewland

2007-10-08T10:38:00.000-07:00

So here we are, five days from the show opening and having navigated a series of strange little problems. While things mostly seem to be going smoothly on the actor/creative front, we just keep having little hic-cups, like the fliers printing without contact information (solved by a sticker, of course, but still, annoying) to the theater slating us for the wrong space (a mistake they quickly and competently fixed but still, a whole day of wondering how much re-staging we would have to do) and now, most recently, having to scrap our whole set concept because we got it in there yesterday only to realize it just didn't work for the story we were telling (something I'm only mildly miffed at because I never envisioned this as a set show anyway, so there is a whole step we could have skipped if we'd just gone with simplicity- not to mention all the money we could have saved). And none of this makes me think the show is going to be anything less than great, in fact, interestingly enough, in the midst of our set crisis I actually felt "normal" for the first time in days, my constant fatigue and worry suddenly melting as I dealt with a very real and present problem and did one of the things I do best, which is be a director and get a bunch of people to focus and figure out a solution together. That's just as much a testimony to all the cool people I have involved with this show too- we make a good team- but as we inch our way towards opening I'm sure I'll still be holding my breath. I forgot how nervous I get when it's my own work up on display, especially a play as personal as this, but in the back of my head I also know, with equal conviction, that it's the rumblings and bumps that often lead to a more satisfying success, and when, at last, I finally get to rest for a while after this show, it will make for a better evening of sedate lounging, lounging on that knowledge and that success.

Opening Two Weeks From Tonight...

2007-09-28T10:46:00.000-07:00

On November 12, 2006, Mathew Drake, age 33, was admitted to St. Mary’s hospital with what at the time appeared to be internal bleeding, apparently from a fall Mr. Drake had suffered while climbing a ladder at his home. There was some suspicion the fall might have been induced by a mild stroke or some kind of seizure, but this was due to disorientation on the part of the patient, who could not remember the exact details of how he came to acquire his injuries. At the time of admission, patient was not considered to be in critical condition and when he was pronounced dead at 3 PM the next day, it was a surprise to all staff involved with this particular patient. However, at said time, on November 13, 2006, patient was pronounced dead by two doctors, as witnessed by two nurses in attendance and a medical assistant on sight, and exhibited all standard signs of having been deceased. An autopsy was not performed. His revival three days later while awaiting embalming at Sasco And Company Funeral Parlor is shocking and, as yet, unexplained.

No Nude Men Productions presents...

...a philosophical debate...

"For every man or woman who has undergone something inexplicable but is seeking to come to terms with it, there is another one who is working as hard as possible, consciously or not, to avoid confronting what they essentially feel is an un-confrontable truth. It is not uncommon for these two different types to know one another and be in opposition over the same event. It is not even unusual for them to be lovers, or otherwise romantically involved."

...a religious forum...

"My relationship with God is one that a lot of people seem to want to have an opinion on and that doesn’t bother me in the slightest. I don’t live my life under a bush, flaming or otherwise, and I’ve come to realize that will always mean that people will be watching and talking amongst themselves and I don’t begrudge them this because I do the same thing I just sometimes have the luxury of doing it in front of a camera or on the radio or across the pages of a magazine. Which isn’t what makes my opinions right, mind you. The fact that they are right is what makes them right. Well, and how do I know this? That’s the question everybody always has for me: how do you know you are right? Because of my relationship with God, that’s how. "

...a romance...

"I looked in his eyes, which were like… the part of a flower where it replicates itself… and he looked back into mine and there was no comparison, no judgment, no shame, no doubt or fear or guilt… there was just understanding, recognition… this amazing sense of validation. Of love. Of respect. And I’m sorry, I want to be understanding and I love Simon, I do, and I love so many other people in my life but what I felt then, in that moment, with this man was somehow so beyond all that. It was not human, it was not flawed and it was not specific. And I’m not saying it was better, I’m just saying it was different and I think… I think it was in the moment after I knew this that he spoke to me in this voice that was like… a hurricane played out on softly toned musical instruments… and I listened."

...a ghost story...

"I first became interested in the… shall we say, “supernatural” when I was a little girl, maybe six or seven… probably seven… and I used to play this game with my sisters where we would all pretend to be animals. Only I never wanted to be just an ordinary animal. I wanted to be a dead one."

MATHEW 33.06
written and directed by Stuart Bousel
assistant director Rik Lopes
designed by James Tinsley
publicity by Margery Fairchild and Gregorio de Masi

featuring: Ryan Hebert, Kirsten Broadbear, Jason Peelle, Christine Rodgers, Hector Osorio and Kendra Arimoto.

October 12, 13, 19, 20, 26, 27
November 2, 3, 9, 10
Exit Theater Mainstage (156 Eddy Street)

Tickets: $10.00 (October 12 & 13), $15.00 all other performances
Reservations: endymion82@aol.com

"It’s not all scenes and break downs and crying, if that’s what you mean. Most people are done in under an hour and while I would say there’s usually some emotion it’s rarely… hysterical. I mean, certainly by the time they’ve reached me most people… are, I don’t know, past the point of high emotion. They’re in the processing phase, and there’s less… drama. For lack of a better word. There’s just a story, or as I prefer to see it, an account."

Shit...

2007-09-25T18:16:00.000-07:00

...I just came up with a scary, scary idea for a play.

New York- 2007

2007-09-17T06:07:00.000-07:00

So, despite having had a million things to do in San Francisco, or maybe because of it, I skipped town for a week, leaving MATHEW 33:6 in the capable hands of Rik Lopes, to get a little rest and relaxation in New York, where I have been doing just that, if by rest and relaxation we mean experiencing a full on crash, exhaustion on a Lindsey Lohan level (except genuine) and a bit of a mental breakdown to boot.

I got into town on Thursday night after what has been one of the busiest build ups to a vacation ever. This past summer I have essentially been busy with something every single day since July 4th (well, I had half of Labor Day to myself) and on every front: theater, work, private life, etc. MATHEW rehearsals went right up through Wednesday night (as they needed to in order to get the show together on time) and at work things have been relentlessly busy pretty much all summer, with the Pigeon Point festival the second weekend of September and various at work projects like switching over our dental benefits to a new plan and processing the endless number of terminations and new hires that I have come to realize is the true bulk of my duties at Hosteling International (though maybe that will change as things move into the traditionally slower end of the year). To top it all off, I managed to contract poison oak last week (awesome timing, huh?) and some snafoos at the airport just became icing on the cake. Anyway, finally sitting in Leah's living room on Thursday I began to actually relax, just sitting and talking, something I realize I haven't gotten a chance to do very much in this last year, with all the theater crisies and the job change and lord knows what else. And I know this isn't just me- it seems like every one I know has been having a year of change and endless busy- but I was actually hoping to have a bit more of a relaxing 2007. I'm still hoping the fall will prove to be so, particularly after MATHEW is up.

Anyway, Friday I felt tired but still managed to make it up to the Cloisters to see the Unicorn Tapestries- an annual pilgramage for me. For decades now this has been my favorite work of art and so it was comforting to sit in their hall again and kind of wonderful to discover something new- a frog embroidered into the lower left-hand corner of the seventh tapestry, pointed out to me by a pair of women I started chatting with after they needed some help figuring out the sequence of the tapestries. A quick stroll around Fort Tryon park helped me feel better too but then, later that night, while watching a performance of CURTAINS, a gun went off onstage during the second act and my heart started racing and basically didn't stop for half an hour. It got so bad I had to go sit in the lobby for a while, where two kindly ushers chatted me up and I got to watch the merch boys dance the final number while I waited for the show to end so Leah and I could go home. Now, I have been known to have the occasional panic attack, usually in a theater (oh, the irony) and this was definitely one of those but the ones I've had in the past (all three of them) have all been pretty brief, usually subsiding in less than a few minutes and usually because my brain is able to say, "Calm down." This time around, even though my brain was going a mile a minute and I was able to joke and cajole with the ushers, I just couldn't seem to make it happen. And then the moment Leah and I were in a cab back to her neighborhood, everything was fine. An hour later we were sitting in her living room chatting as if nothing had ever happened.

The couple of days since then have been a mixed bag. Sometimes I feel incredibly tired, sometimes I feel great. Seeing my friends Nat and Morgen has definitely been wonderful- I miss my old Tucson chums so badly and it's wonderful to see Nat doing so well in New York as an actor. We went and checked out XANADU, which is actually tons of fun and much more satisfying than CURTAINS (with or without a panic attack), which I found to be cute but nothing more- totally unmemorable music (except for a song performed by Jason Daniely, who has a great voice and can sell even the blandest score), really flat jokes of a forced and almost vaudevillian nature, and really no content what-so-ever. If it wasn't for a brilliantly brittle performance by the gentleman playing the director of the play within a play (I saw him last year as the manservant in THE DROWSY CHAPERONE but can't recall his name) there would be very little else to latch onto- the show is very staid, old-school Broadway and feels like a museum peice instead of a period piece: the kind of thing destined for a good life in community theater but certainly not worth 111.00 bucks. And no, I'm not just bitter that I didn't make it through the second act. Actually, I'm glad that this was the show where, if I was going to have to have a fit of exhaustion, it happened. Because I really wasn't missing much. Which doesn't mean the show is bad, mind you, just that it's not good. It aims only to entertain but who exactly I couldn't say: the aesthetic is for people who long for the musical theater of the 50's and 60's but not the edgier stuff of that time or even the more memorable popular pieces. And it's very disappointing coming from the same team of writer/composer that brought us CHICAGO and CABARET and KISS OF THE SPIDER WOMAN, all much better shows with real meat and content and, most importantly, good music. As Kander and Ebb go, this is basically their TWO GENTLEMAN OF VERONA or MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR. Except that, if done well, I like MERRY WIVES MORE.

XANADU is, by contrast, genuinely fun and, while not exactly deep, actually does boast better characters and a much more sly commentary on the current state of musical theater (while also, ironically, still basically being a period piece as it is set- and how- in the early 1980's). The book is very funny and witty- they get both their Greek mythology correct and their pop culture savvy points- and the score is poppy, sure, but it also allows for some great singing and very theatrical moments and while I was a bit on edge (for fear of repeating the night before) I actually got lost for whole five minute stretches at a time and laughed from beginning to end. The cast is great, and look like they are having so much fun, Kerry Butler in particular is a riot doing her best Olivia Newton John and Tony Roberts, always good, aquits himself with much dignity- no easy feat in such a silly show. Mary Testa, who I adore, is wonderful as an evil muse but sadly a bit over-shadowed by her partner in crime, played by Jackie Hoffman, who I've never seen live before and who is pretty undisputably a comic genius. Cheyenne Jackson is an excellent pretty lunk-head and has a great singing voice- there are moments between him and Butler where the show actually transcends from esoteric guilty pleasure to real show and it's all because of their respective vocal talents. Plus it's short- only 90 minutes- and I came out of it feeling better than I had going in.

The real find, however, is a play called MAURITIUS, by Theresa Rebeck. A random pick from the half-price ticket counter by Morgen and myself, the show is easily the best new American play I have seen in the last five years and hands down the best script I've come accross since TURBINE in Wellington last November. Similar to TURBINE it's about stuff I'm not immediately able to identify with (in this case, stamp collecting) but the humanity of the characters and the twists of the plot sucked me in and got me to care and while I kept expecting it to turn into a typical modern American drama of the "take the money and run" type, it never went there and the surprises were all pleasant instead of the violent and nasty variety which I feel like characterises a lot of our post-Tarantino/KILLER JOE dramas these days. Particularly good is Bobby Cannavale as a theif with a heart of gold and F. Murray Abraham as an obsessive stamp collector who you think is going to turn out to be the stand in for the crazy gangster (or viule IRA member, if this was an Irish drama) but more or less comes off as honorable and just really high-strung. Alison Pill, who I saw last year in "The Lieutenant of Innishmore" plays the principal character well, a woman who you don't want to succeed (she's a bit of a cunt) but at the same time you don't want to see anything bad happen to her either. And when the two characters you have pegged as rubes (played by Katie Finneran and Dylan Baker) turn the tables on everyone else at the end, it's a testimony to the skill of the writer that you see them as both justified and excessively petty, as dangerous as you previously thought them weak, but equally as vile as you once thought them more or less good people. But that's the best part of this show (besides some really, really good dialogue): the people in it are, essentially, all good people, just hungry and fucked up and searching like most of us are. But Rebeck is kind to her characters in the end, and there is even a qualified but satisfying close on an up note, something I feel has gotten so rare in modern drama. I can't help but admire her work and wish her the best- I want to see more plays from her!

And so, that's it. Four days into the trip, three plays down and no real plans to see any more at the moment. Leah's theory is that I need some real down time from the theater on every level, including being an audience member and she might be right. One can over-dose on anything, in the end. The next couple of days I have relatives and friends to catch up with anyway, and so there really isn't time to see anything else anyway, without really pushing myself and my schedule to its limit. And that just doesn't seem to be a good idea right now. Sometimes we have to listen when our body tells us, in no uncertain terms, that it's time to rest. And it is time to rest.

OPENING A MONTH FROM TONIGHT!

2007-09-12T08:54:00.001-07:00

our last show of a busy, busy year...

No Nude Men Productions
presents

MATHEW 33:6

Written and Directed by Stuart Eugene Bousel

Designed by James Tinsley

Assistant Directed/Stage Managed by Rik Lopes

Publicity by Margery Fairchild

October 12, 13,19,20,26,27
November 2,3,9,10

The Exit Theatre (mainstage)
156 Eddy Street
San Francisco, CA

All shows @8pm

Tickets: $10 (1st weekend)
$15 (all other performances)

Reservations: email endymion82@aol.com

In modern day America, Mathew Drake (Ryan Hebert) falls off a ladder and is rushed to the hospital where his unexpected death is no where near as shocking as his return to the living three days later while awaiting embalming. Proclaimed a hoax, a freak of nature and an act of God all at the same time, Mathew is rocketed to the center of a nationwide debate helmed on one side by a well-meaning but underhanded liberal Methodist minister (Hector Osorio) and on the other by a Christian neo-Con journalist (Kendra Arimoto). Meanwhile his doctor (Christine Rogers), his lover (Jason Peelle) and his therapist (Kirsten Broadbear) all struggle to find ways of understanding his experience and their own part as unwitting witnesses. One part philosophical debate, one part religious forum, one part ghost story and one part romance, the play raises the question of how God might actually be received in our current political climate- and how sometimes a miracle is more heart-breaking than a tragedy.

No Nude Men was founded in the spring of 2003 by Stuart Bousel, Warden Lawlor, Chris Kelly, Stacy Malia, Nirmala Nataraj and Ryan Hayes, who christened the new company with a bare-bones production of Christopher Marlow's Edward II staged in a gallery in the Mission. They have since produced a great deal of original work by Stuart Bousel (Speak To Me, Troijka, Love Egos Alternative Rock, The Exiled, Polyxena in Orbit) as well as several other world premieres by Nirmala Nataraj (The Book of Genesis Remixed and Remastered), Alison Luterman (Oasis), Hilde Susan Jaegntes (Spoon Justice) and most recently, David Duman (Five Short Episodes in the Life of Sacagawea). They have also been behind a number of classics (Love's Labors Lost, Hamlet, Phaedra, No Exit) passionately staged in new and thought-provoking ways. They have employed a number of the Bay Area's finest directors (including John Dixon, Wylie Herman, Bekah McNeil and Jesse Baldwin) and have worked in almost every indy theater space in town, including Spanganga, The Exit, The Climate, New Langton Arts and the Exit on Taylor. No Nude Men is a fiercely independent company, dedicated to making smart, genuine and daring theater, all on a shoestring budget.

Awakening From The Dream

2007-08-27T10:10:00.000-07:00

So as we approach the final weekend of A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM I find myself struggling with a cold, planning the next show and feeling tired but accomplished, especially as my friends have finally started to make it out to the show. Amazing, isn't it, how we can get fabulous reviews and have sold out houses but it's the opinions of a select few that really make our day or make us feel like what we poured all this work into was really worth the effort.

Currently reading a new version of the ILIAD that has been re-written, almost line for line, but with repetitions cut (thereby reducing the text at least a fourth) and the gods cut and the narrative retooled to all be delivered first person by 20 characters that the author more or less pulled from the text. So far, half-way through, it certainly is a quick read (the irony of my life is that, while I'm smitten with the Trojan War and Trojan mythos, THE ILIAD is, in fact, not an enjoyable read for me) but I must admit I am dismayed by this modern trend of taking the gods out of the myths. Every time I see someone do it, director or writer, it always seems to be accompanied by this idea that the actual presence of the gods as characters robs the human beings of depth and volition but I think that's because so many modern people mis-interpret how the gods function- as foils, as symbols, as allegories. In my opinion, the Greeks are more fascinating because they believed so strongly in Fate and the presence of the supernatural and yet were so ardent about how they lived their mortal existences in spite of that. And this is why the Gods were not only kept for my version of the Trojan War, but expanded. Not that anyone will see my version any time soon. I mean, unless of course, a 50 grand or so suddenly drops into my lap.

Getting ready to head back east for a while in September. Looking forward to it, when I'm not too tired to find it vaguely a nuisance. I just have to remind myself that I always enjoy myself in New York and Toronto, even if it feels like I don't have the money and time to go. I do think this will be such a great Thanksgiving though, as I plan to just stay in town, the theater season will be done by then, and I am going to sleep, sleep, sleep!

Mid-Dream

2007-08-09T07:48:00.000-07:00

Well, the show is up and running and kind of going nuts successful. We've gotten through two completely full weekend (it was particularly packed this last weekend) and the first of the reviews came out and it was really positive, especially as she came on what was our one weak performances so far. My job seems to be more or less over though I still lead warm ups before the show and have, so far, tagged along on each performance. This weekend I'll be covering for our PA/AD, Amy, so she can watch the show with her friends and family, which is cool except that I myself finally have friends coming this weekend and would have loved to watch the show with them... but Amy deserves the day off. She's been awesome to work with and I really can't thank her enough for everything she's done.

On other fronts things seem to be kind of wacky. The show, though a success, has already gotten a bit tedious for me. It's just a huge committment, trecking down to Woodside twice a week and even though I now have my evenings back it is hard to do anything productive with them because I just feel really tired all the time. Work is work, and has been much busier these last few weeks than previously. We seem to be in the midst of yet another huge shift in employees, so people are dropping like flies left and right which means I'm processing a lot of paperwork as old folks move on and new folks come in. Of course, tis the season to go hosteling (I myself am taking a bunch of the people from the play to stay at Point Montara this weekend) but I'm starting to feel like I'm at the end of the line energy-wise for me and and I'm still trying to put together the last show of the year. Things seems to keep getting gummed up on that front too, with ACT dragging its feet on renting me some rehearsal space and everyone I'm approaching for roles taking an equally long time to make up their minds. The result is, by the time I finally get some free time I can't seem to really appreciate it and don't do anything with it. I don't even mean write (though that's what I'd prefer to be doing), I mean I don't even read or exercise. I kind of just waste time on the computer chatting with guys I'm not all that into or surfing for stuff I don't really care about. I don't feel apathetic, mind you, just tired. Really tired. And kind of... despondent, with an underlying current of panic about not doing much. Is this authentic or just my over-acheiver complex kicking in, stopping me from resting?

And the fog is just so thick right now and totally removes any desire to do anything... I'm heading to the east coast for a week and half in September but I sort of just want a week off in San Francisco to do nothing... Of course, I realize I shouldn't be complaining about my life of hit plays, travel and too many social engagements, but can't I do it for a little while? Just until this blog ends?

And The Dream Begins...

2007-07-27T11:47:00.000-07:00

Well, here we are, the day before A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM opens, with 11 of our 12 shows already sold out and the 12th show half-way there. Dress rehearsal last night was a typical dress rehearsal, with clunky stuff and reliable moments falling flat all over the place while last minute discoveries and flares of brilliance did their best to keep it from being a disaster. I'm fairly confident the show will be quite good tomorrow, even if on a couple fronts we'll be sliding in just over the finish line with our regency robes and top hats in hand. But rare is the show I have worked on that didn't have that feeling to one extent or another.

We tweaked the ending last night, providing a closing moment after Puck's final speech that allowed me to bring my vision of MIDSUMMER as a story about Helena full circle. Walking to work today I had another random thought about the beginning but it's probably a little too late in the game to add anything else. As is, there will be a lump in my throat through the whole first performance hoping everything more or less adjusts to the added factor of 60 audience members being moved through the woods.

Still, it was nice to have found the emotional center of MIDSUMMER I was looking for, and finding that in Helena was the answer. For those who won't be able to see the show, I added her returning to the palace after the final dialogue of the fairies, after Puck's last speech, in search of her lost wedding wreath, which she leaves on her chair in the midst of the good will uproar following the disaster production of PYRAMUS AND THISBE. She walks in just as Puck hits his last line, and she does what no other mortal in the show does (besides the transformed Bottom): she sees one of the fairies. Puck, in turn, sees her, and hands her the wedding wreath. They bow to one another and exit in different directions, her lingering a moment longer as Amy Manley plays them out on a recorder.

It's a cute ending and it will ring very resonate, I think, with folks who get this play the same way I do, and see in all its frivolity that old Shakespeare darkness, the ever-looming shadow that reminds us that this is all just a dream, transient and perfect, and fragile as frost or mist or any of the other things we associate with fairies, the most common symbol of the charm of brevity if ever I could think of one. Helena gets this most of all, I think, because she has seen her lover come to her and vanish and return to her again, and knows that to accept and love him is to do so knowing that he is not stable, not eternal, and more likely than not, going to stray again. But what else can she do? She loves him. The decision is made.

But what I love is the idea that she understands this at the end of the play, and that is why, for one moment, she gets to see what no one else can see: the darkness of the world in perfect harmony with the light, and the nature of things nodding to one another. The bow is Puck's salute to Helena's strength, her ability to remain steadfast in her love, her role as the stable tree in the midst of the storm. It is a thank you to her for being a source of magic just as he is, and a concession, for the moment, to her power. And also a promise (perhaps even a threat) that he will return, and that there will be more changes, more resolution, and always, more dreams.

Another Busy Weekend Survived

2007-07-23T12:23:00.000-07:00

As the summer turns its half-way point I find myself having survived the first of what looks to be a series of very busy weekends.

Saw Wylie in COWBOY VS. SAMAURI (by Michael Golamco), which was surprisingly well-written (except for the one female character, who had that annoying quality of being a collection of quirks instead of actually human) and in which he gave a wonderful dramatic performance, continuing to prove to me that he's really developed into a fine and versatile actor over the years- such a far cry from the guy who once told me he wanted to be a stand-up comic.

Finished up the dress rehearsal for A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM on Saturday and got back into the city just in time for Chris McCaleb to swing into town. He brought over his friend Felicia, a content manager at YouTube, and they brought me groceries so we made dinner at my house- fish and capers, cous-cous that I applaud Felicia for actually knowing how to make correctly, and this blue-berry orange cake thing that we left out all night but was surprisingly still moist 24 hours later. We drank a couple of bottles of wine and tried to go on the Corwin Street slides around 11 (on a Saturday) but some evil woman was standing there telling people to go home and that the park was closed. Which isn't true, the park never closes because it's basically a side-street anyway, but we were so weirded out that we left after lobbing a few choice swear words her way, very quickly going from nice kids out to have wholesome fun to angry twenty-somethings with potty mouths. It was oddly kind of amusing, and now I fear this woman has become part of the mythology of all three of our lives.

Yesterday was the SF Theater Festival, where MIDSUMMER did a thirty minute segment that went very well and then Stacy Malia directed a staging of David Duman's FIVE SHORT EPISODES IN THE LIFE OF SACAGAWEA as the No Nude Men contribution, which was also very well received and very very well attended. We seem to be cornering the festival market, if nothing else, though I think that's because we actually get off book for our shows, put work into the staging, and remember to do stuff like shout so people can hear us. Only a few minor mis-haps throughout the day: Syri's fairy wing was stepped on, the emcee at our stage announced me as Stephen (twice), I forgot my hat at breakfast. Chris and Felicia skipped off after MIDSUMMER to see a Smashing Pumpkins concert but the rest of the gang headed over to the Cheiftan where I stayed till 10 this year and wasn't even the last to go. All in all a good day, even if I am feeling a bit sluggish today.

Meanwhile, MIDSUMMER has sold out all but two of its final performances. How wonderful to have such a run-away hit, the first one I've helmed since LOVE'S LABORS LOST. And how strange to find the 500 year old plays sometimes pull in bigger crowds than the newer stuff. Is that just because they're established, or is it because they still have a wider appeal? Probably not answerable, though certainly debatable.

Speaking of modern playwrights, Nicky Silver recently contacted me to protest my calling him a hack in an earlier blog and after exchanging several very nice e-mails I am willing to say publicly that while I don't retract my earlier statement, I do plan to read up on more of his work in an effort to get a more well-rounded sense of his cannon. Seems I have been only seeing the ones that he doesn't consider his best work and he argued so eloquently for me to retrench my perception of him that I can't imagine but that he's right. So once the dust settles a bit from MIDSUMMER I've got my reading list amended and ready to go.

On a completely different note, been thinking a lot about HP Lovecraft lately. May have to re-read some of his stories. Also wondering if he's public domain yet... it may be time to start scouting for adaptation material... you know, for that period in my life, should it ever come again, when I'll actually have time to write. Still working my way through IMAJICA, which is beautifully written, as all Clive Barker is, but the characters are kind of flat and it's not sustaining my interest through it's fairly massive length (900 pages). I will of course finish it, because I finish everything, but it may be time to pick-up a Peter S. Beagle novel or something equally as surefire enjoyable since I feel like I've been plodding through this one for a really long time.

Been having lots of conversations in which I've brought up TURBINE, lately. It's amazing how that play has stuck with me so vividly, 8 months later, but I can't ever seem to stop talking about. Shout out to the folks at BATS in Wellington... you have an American fan hoping he'll be out to see your work again, soon.

Hooray for Mathew!

2007-07-13T15:05:00.000-07:00

I just found out that MATHEW 33:06 not only safely arrived in his envelope, but has been cleared to move on to phase 2 of the Marin Theater/Sky Cooper New Works contest, meaning they have requested to read the full manuscript! Yay! Not bad news to get on a Friday the 13th.

The Last Five Years

2007-07-11T11:22:00.001-07:00

So, in the midst of all my projects and craziness I have discovered, in my precious few moments of downtime, this beautiful little musical called THE LAST FIVE YEARS by Jason Robert Brown and starring the woman who has more or less become my favorite Broadway star, Sherie Rene Scott. I realize, of course, that it premiered back in 2001 in Chicago and so I'm really coming late to the bandwagon, but while I've owned the CD for a while I just never really listened to it until this past weekend when it basically broke my heart (it's all about that last song, "Goodbye Until Tomorrow/I Could Never Rescue You", and how the whole show builds to that moment which is the end and the beginning at the same time). In my never-ending quest to find stuff in modern theater to believe in and admire I seem, lately, to be getting more out of musicals than straight theater, maybe because it's harder to do irony and ghastly acts of cruelty set to hummable melodies, or maybe just because the part of my soul that isn't broken enjoys the money note so much. Either way, it's been providing a delightful soundtrack to the last few days and I totally listened to it four times before heading off to Sarah Stewart's wedding on Sunday night (where I bumped into my old friend Lisa Fowle, up from Los Angeles with her new boyfriend and as beautiful and insane as ever). I keep thinking, I have to remember to bring that kind of life and vitality to this production of MIDSUMMER, which I know is possible and which I know will happen once we're in the final stages of this massive and unweildly project. Oh, Sherie, won't you come and tutor my cast in emotional vibrancy and total committment to the material? I'm sure they'll totally give you two comps for your efforts!

Three Weeks Away...

2007-07-06T16:19:00.000-07:00

...from the more or less official opening of MIDSUMMER. Of course, it's actually previews, but in my opinion, as soon as you charge someone a dollar to see your show, it's open, no matter what you're calling it. So... we're three weeks out from opening, and yes, I'm feeling a little overwhelmed, by everything that still needs to get done.

That said, it is going well, for the most part. The land is shaping up beautifully, with the crew and staff working on building an amphitheater (by hand) to seat 50 or so folks down by the creek-bed that I have chosen as the primary playing space. It's a relatively level area with one magnificent stump and several well located rocks for actors to perch on. There's one small rock that everyone seems to trip on that I have now dubbed "the idiot rock" or occasionally "the stupid rock" but less people trip with each rehearsal so we seem to be getting used to it. Costumes, scenery, lines all seem to be coming together, though I was recently put on prop duty in an effort to relieve some of the pressue on Syri, who has been wearing so many hats I'm thankful I'm not writing the program because I wouldn't even know where to begin crediting her. The actors are holding their own in a unique performing environment and for that they all deserve kudos, particularly as acting talent also seems to be very evenly distributed and I think I cast the show well.

Press angle still leaves something to be desired (I'm surprised there isn't more coverage considering the uniqueness of this project) but we've already sold out our first four performances and ticket sales continue to increase. We're going to spend a night mid-way through the run at the youth hostel at Point Montara and that's fun to look forward to, provided I don't fall apart from exhaustion before then.

Not writing at all, despite having a million projects in my head... there just isn't time and the show is sapping a lot of creative energy from me. Just means I'll have to wait till after it opens and things hopefully calm down, or at least become less taxing on the mental end.

Been sort of intellectually scattered lately... not sure where June went...

And As I Despair Over Where My Career Is And Isn't Going...

2007-06-22T14:43:00.000-07:00

...I think to myself: okay, what's the worst? I really do suck. So then what? Clearly I'm too stupid and pig-headed to stop trying anyway, so I might as well just keep going and get zen with it.

Back In Your Box, Gay Boy

2007-06-19T10:48:00.000-07:00

So, I'm sitting in Cafe Fleur yesterday, waiting to meet with Nirmala so we can go over the draft of THE MONK she submitted to me last week, and this actor who I have seen in a couple productions around town, who is actually pretty good craft-wise, sits down next to me with another guy and starts yacking about how he just got back from England and didn't like it (too expensive, bad food, men are all ugly) and then goes on to have one of those conversations I thought only gay men on TV had for about forty minutes before getting up and running off to whatever it is that gay actors who don't like Brits do with their down time.

Now, not to bash this boy, because he might be perfectly cool in the right context, but clearly he was in the wrong parts of England (or we just don't have the same taste, which is also fine) and more importantly it brought back to me where I saw him last: in a friend's very banal stage production this past weekend, of a collection of gay themed entertainments entitled BOYLESQUE.

Normally I tend to write reviews of the local theater I see unless I didn't really care for it and yet knew someone involved with it, which would be the case this time around and I plan to say no more about the production. It's not that my friend didn't do as good of a job as he could have, given the situation, it's more that I question the purpose behind his entire effort- but that often seems to be my role, a terribly unpopular one in San Francisco, where the name of the game often seems to be, "Let's just put on a show and who cares why or how!" An atitude I actually would really condone if it didn't so often result in really half-baked, mediocre shows that cost too much and feel extraordinarily under-rehearsed and ill-conceived. But enough about that, let's get to what I really want to complain about: the woman who got up before the show and told us all that the theater was dedicated to the presentation of marginalized voices that would otherwise not get representation: gays and lesbians, transgendered, minorities.

Oh... my... God... WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN LIVING AND WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT? How can anyone, in all seriosness, say that gays and lesbians don't have representation in San Francisco, where two of the largest and most established theater companies in town are both queer companies? How can anyone here thump the minority drum when there are two Asian American theater companies already and at least one major African-American theater company? Finally, in this post "blind casting" world, why do we need any of these things when the bulk of what's on Broadway is either gay or contains gay themes, when major theater companies everywhere cast regardless of race, even when doing shows where that would be an issue or doesn't make sense (like a production of CAROSEL I saw where mother and daughter were played by an African American and a Caucasian American, respectively- I mean, hello- genetics!) and when, in general, theater has become anything but dominated by the white, heterosexual male perspective? I mean, really- COME ON. Isn't diversity really supposed to be about all of us, regardless of orientation and race and gender and sex, competeing on the same level with special breaks only coming to those who say, I don't know, have talent? And I say this as a gay male! Albeit, a gay male who has a really hard time playing his gay card because, and this is always the real kicker, I worry it'll stigmatize my work. And not because I'm gay, but rather because "gay" at this point, often doesn't mean "good" when it comes down to the typical product. And the reason why, in my opinion, is because gays have defined for themselves, quite rigidly, what is "acceptable" or "positivie" gay theater and what is not (read: "the enemy") and there is little interest or tolerance (and thus opportunity) in anything that is not. Thus is diversity often times marginalized in a minority community, by the very community itself, when diversity might in any way threaten that community's sense of itself.

Back to the point, I understand how historically we needed these companies but really, in this decade, in a town this self-consciously liberal, there is about as much need for another gay theater company as there is for another gay bar. Why don't, instead, we try putting together a few more theater companies that actually emphasize talent over sex appeal, content over gimmicks, or at the very least employ directors who think their concepts through and actors who can actually memorize their lines and deliver them with some conviction? I know this is a crazy idea but those are the types of theater companies that actually create a scene and keep it going and if we ever want to be a cultural capital we need to remember that while it's important to give gay and minority voices a place to be heard, it's also important to give people a reason to show up- all people, including white heterosexuals who might want to see themselves represented on stage just like everyone else. Give them something to enjoy and, amazingly enough, it opens them up to seeing the other stuff too. But ostrasize any one group and all intellectual and emotional doors begin to close.

It all comes down to Shakespeare, who remains one of the greatest playwrights ever not because he was a white heterosexual male whose work was forced upon us by the imperial British, but because like all great writers he believed more in the greater epic of the human condition than any one condition in particular. His work spans cultures because even after the colonists went home or died off his ideas lingered and resonated. One of my great fears about this moment in our cultural history is that we are ignoring the Shakespeares amongst us because they don't come from an in-vogue minority or even more likely, do, but don't see that minority's agenda or tragedy as the driving force behind their artistic aspirations- or as a justification for why they should be a recognized contributor to the arts. Having something to say (and how they say it) should be far more important than the arbitrary genetic heritage of who is saying it. But these days, in theater, I'm not always sure if that's the case... and as a member of a minority, it doesn't escape me how absurd it is that I'm the one saying this.

Oh, yeah... Happy Pride.

Mathew In An Envelope

2007-06-15T14:18:00.001-07:00

So, I submitted MATHEW 33:06 to another contest today. This will be, I believe, the fourth time it has gone out since I finished the working draft back in March of last year. Forced to pick only ten pages from the script to include with the submission, I re-read it for the first time in ages and was quite moved by everything I had poured into it, all my fears about the state of the larger world, all my optimism that we can come through this period of darkness we are in... and then of course, all those smoldering feelings of longing and regret that seems to characterize my work just as much as the off-beat hope and romance that every now and then inspires a little bit a fanmail... is it okay if I'm becoming my own cliche? Is it okay if I like that cliche?

Shortly after finishing off this submission and posting it I had a little attack of sadness: a twinge of despair laced with envy that I've come to see as my general frustration with the state of the art and my own inability to tap into that cultural zeitgeist of irony and cruelty that seems to characterize everything hip and "good" these days. Though I can be mean in my writing, I don't know how to be so self-conciously cold and vindictive the way a lot of my peers seem to be, and while some people have told me that's precisely what sets me apart I sometimes feel like it's exactly what keeps me down: if only I didn't believe so passionately in the fundamental good of human beings, maybe I'd have a hit play by now.

It's been an odd time. Many a year has a play or film I didn't like been glorified and canonized and made me wonder if deep down I'm just not good at all this and don't know what's good and what isn't... It's hard to have been working so long in this field and not wonder why I haven't "made it", whatever that means. Recently a friend of mine mounted a production that, while full of interesting ideas and good points, was astonishingly devoid of content or humanity and yet it won praise from every direction; up there with HUNTERS AND GATHERERS for being yet another show I've seen that is all style and no substance... thought at least both were not the banality that was SPRING AWAKENING, now so ridiculously praised and popular that people feel this need to point that out to me, like it somehow is going to change my mind about what I saw. The entire career of Nicky Silver, who I think is mostly just a foul-mouthed pessimist hack, continues to mystify me: even as he continues to wow the smarter set on both coasts. And it all comes together to make me wonder: am I wrong to like what I like? Am I behind the times to ask for plays to be about something dangerous and profound without just devolving into mimed atrocities on stage? Am I often bored at the theater because I am really just a bitter failed playwright who thinks nobody's work is better than his own?

And then I think about the last two original works I've seen that I really, really liked... in Wellington, TURBINE (by the SEEyD Theater Company), so thoughtful, so funny, so complex, so simple, so filled with content and yet... so stylish all at once. And CRYSTAL DAZE (by Deborah Eubanks) at the Exit, really a pleasant surprise, far more intelligent and moving than I expected it to be considering the subject matter and again, stylish and original in execution without seeming affectated or precious or overwrought... Both good works. Both times I got lost in the theater in something new and exciting. So yes, I know there is good theater out there and good in the sense that I mean it: thoughtful, complex, human, dignified, brave, demanding of its audience and yet user-friendly and watchable... and does my work come off as the same? I guess I just have to hope so.

Is the real confidence in the writing of the play or the sending it off to the contest? So many people think it's the writing but it's really not... it's in the moment when you lay it down, with everything you poured into it so obvious now to the outside world, and kneel before the altar of a god you are fairly certain is full of shit half the time and yet you beg it to accept you...

I have always been two things at once: someone with strong convictions, and a high self-monitor who constantly questions those very opinions. I have had people tell me I am both too forgiving and others tell me that I'm far too demanding. What it really comes down to is that I simply do not shut off my analytical mind, making me in some ways the best audience member ever, and sometimes, also, the worst person to see something with because it's pretty rare I want to just go out for a beer afterwards and not process the art I spent the last few hours enjoying or not enjoying. And isn't that the point? Isn't that why we're putting our stuff out there, folks, to get a response, good or bad?

So then what's my complaint? What's my wish? I guess... I want to believe that we as a species are a lot more profound and human than a lot of modern work would have me believe and I want to see that reflected, especially in the theater... I don't want the other stuff gone, mind you, I just want it seen in perspective, analyzed within context and outside of hysteria, fashion and trend... I want there to be a place for everything. I want MATHEW 33:06, in his submission envelope, with his tale of God and agony and ideas and lost boyfriends and hope, to find a good home.

Another

2007-06-11T15:40:00.001-07:00

And here's one more random memory...

Standing in your shower with you, mid-morning chatter, you at the front and me at the back but we face each other through a curtain of raining water, hair matted on our heads and all down our equally hirsute and soapy bodies, and we are in the delightful period of trying to describe everything we feel about each other and our situation, trying to give words to the impossibly indescribable but compelled to by our shared traits of neurosis and the love of limitless language, bounded by our fears and hopes, and I say, "I just want to walk around the world creating little balls of chaos with you wherever we go." And you kiss me and say, "I really hope you meant that."

Father's Day, My Dad, Gay Pride

2007-06-08T10:49:00.000-07:00

I have often found it amusing that Father's Day falls in the midst of Gay Pride month, which with all the self-absorbed nuance of a gay man I have always really seen as more or less Gay Man's Month, a viewpoint not aided by having spent the last three years living in the Castro. And yet, it's a complex self-absorption, because one of the many things that I feel has often set me apart from other gay men (and may in fact be the root of why I so rarely meet gay men with whom I can relate to on a deeper level) is that I had an excellent relationship with my father, all the way up until his death from emphysema back in 2002.

Which doesn't mean we didn't fight. We fought like animals sometimes, never physically of course but the war of opinions that would surface between us was not only intense but even brutal in its expression: I learned how to talk from my father and beyond that I learned how to debate, how to undermine opponents and, when I'm really on a role, how to level people in five sentences or less and shoot them a look that basically says, "Fuck you even if you are right: you don't sound as good as me and I'll see you hung for not having my superior linguistic skills." I learned from him that my mind was my greatest asset because my Dad, a former semi-professional golpher who gave up his life on the Tour for a wife, some kids and then a genetic mutation that left him with half an immune system for the second half of his life, understood at a relatively young age that the body goes to shit no matter how much you exercise or how well you eat and the mind is by far more important in the legacy of your own lifetime and beyond. I also learned from my father that there is always something you can do, that nothing is ever finished till you're dead, and that we are not the kind of people who capitulate. All these are good things, and also made for good arguments.

The source of a lot of our strife was the fundamental difference between us, which is that I am not the intellectual my father would have loved me to be. Smart I am, this is true, and without question was I, by 18, wider read than my father, on my road to being better educated and probably, intrinsically, more curious and inquisitive by nature. But at the heart of my personality I am a sentimentalist, an emotional person of deep passions, nostalgic, and lyrical; my dad was mathmatical, logical, good humored and even indulgent but not nurturing or romantic and certainly not idealistic. His head for business he wasn't able to pass onto me, though I did learn how to manage money and that's probably the most obvious thing I inherited from him; the less obvious ones are the more important of course: our pride, always mingled with insecurity but always the winner when pushed to the edge, our need to understand how things work not just accept that they do, our pleasure in being devil's advocates even when secretly we agree, our refusal to shut up ever at any point about anything and our deeply held conviction that the act of talking and communicating was in fact the great act of human defiance.

Another trait we share is a compulsion to protect women, though in my father's case this could occasionally compromise his ability to see them as true equals. It's in the light of this that he had his first notable brush with homosexuals, namely in the form of my aunt's first husband, who I have only met once, that I know of, and who has always been a shadowy figure despire being very active still in both my aunt's life and the life of their daughter. My father never saw Richard as the enemy or as a bad person but as the protective brother of his younger sister he also harbored no good will towards Richard and that coupled with the underground river of machismo that snakes through most upper class New York Jewish families did occasionally lead him to say less than flattering things about this man and the minority he was more or less our soul representative of. It wasn't until years later I found out I had a gay cousin, not because he was exiled from our family but because our family just didn't talk about those things, which is rather shocking considering the incredibly open atitude towards sex cultivated by my father and many of my other male relatives (and Jews in general), and also considering how all around liberal my family has always been. But this is the stragness of the world we live in and the particular strangeness of homosexuality, which can be hard to champion even for people who were fighting for the rights of women, African Americans and all other manner of oppressed people. I'm not sure why it is that way, but I suspect, in my father's sense of it, it was because he had a hard time seeing gay men as anything but variations on the man who had wronged his sister, and in my father's world such people, while worthy of human rights and respect (there was never any question of that), were not men of the same caliber as himself and the company he seeked to cultivate.

In my father's world obligation and your ability to full-fill it, particularly to women and family, was the true test of manhood and until you could do it you were a boy. And sometimes, when I really think about it, I wonder if he isn't right: after all, gay men are still given to thinking of themselves more as boys than men, and often the concept of men in gay culture is one couched more in the super-ficial like cigar smoking, muscles, leather, facial hair, or in the more subtle and thus more dangerous attributes of irresponsibility: barebacking, non-committment, promiscuity, emotional detachment, jadedness and cruelty. All things frequently depicted as admirable in popular gay culture, which would have you believe life becomes an endless party the moment you come out, and that throwing your brain and your heart away is the natural progression any gay man should follow lest he be labeled self-loathing or just a wet blanket at the circuit party. And don't get me wrong, both my father and myself love a good party (it was a huge disappointment to my dad that I was never the drinker he wanted me to be, though I was and secretly hid it from him for some unknown and youthful reason), but my father was of an older school that believed the greatest joy came from our trust and committment to other people, from the knowledge we gained from them and the ways we could teach them, from our conversations, be they lyrical and nostalgic, or logical and reductive. He would never have approved of this sub-culture dedicated to music so loud you can't hear someone's name, let alone their life story. He approved even less of what he saw as "a culture of non-responsibility" and certainly never accepted the caveat that "we are oppressed and therefore can't be responsible for ourselves or others". "The Jews have been hated and driven out of every culture in the world," I can hear him say, "and yet we have always cultivated, as a people, a sense of our obligation to this world." The last time he said this he was in a wheelchair, with less than a year to live, paging through catalogues of cars he would reconmend my mother to buy with the money from his life insurance policy.

I told my dad I was gay shortly before my elder brother died. I was home for the summer from my first year at Reed where I'd made the common mistake of exploring my bisexuality (something I was aware of at 15 but too in love with a girl to act on) with an idiot of a boy who had no respect for me and yet whom I, far more stupid, had the cliche response of believing I was in love with. And since, of course, I was the kind of man my father wanted me to be, I refused to give up and I refused to admit I was wrong and I was really digging a hole for myself only fixed by my idiot lover sending me an e-mail, midsummer, telling me that he was in lust with someone else. In a moment of 18 year old abandon, I confessed everything to my father, crying my eyes out while he had coffee on the front porch of our house in the hills of Tucson, Arizona. He took it all in and said, "You're using condoms, yes?" The romantic in me, aghast at such a practical and pragmatic response to everything, screamed at him "Of course- do you think I'm stupid," and forgot to thank him for taking it all so well. But then, it had never occurred to me that he wouldn't. Looking back, the amazing thing is not so much that my father was so accepting, but that, despite my teenage ability to think him a nuisance and a moron, I never doubted for a moment that he would be okay with me no matter what or who I had lost my virginity to. When my father finished our conversation on the porch that day he said two more things which stuck in my head and really say a lot about him and us: "Don't tell your mother- yet. She won't handle this well," and "I don't think this guy is for you. I know you want him to be, but it's probably mostly because you're having sex for the first time and you want that to be signifigant. It is- but he's not. He sounds like a boy." It was my father protecting the women in his life, as always, and my father letting me know that he considered me a man- the highest mark of respect he could afford anyone.

My father was also right about both my mother and my lover. My mother did confront the issue of my homosexuality a year later, when my boyfriend at the time, Jim, was enroute to visit me and she insisted on asking where he would be sleeping in the house. It was a tragically awkward conversation, but by the end of the week of his stay she had mellowed out enough to express approval in the way my mother knows best: namely, we had Thanksgiving dinner in the middle of summer, with my boyfriend at the table trying really hard to be an adult (and succeeding). My father by that point was on an oxygen tank when he slept at night but could still move around during the day without it for a few hours at a time. He came to the table that night unhampered and engaged my boyfriend in a conversation Jim still remembers. He was pleased to see I was dating an engineer and more importantly, a good person. When Jim and I amicably broke up later that year, my father was regretful but in the way that let me know he liked us as a couple and would have enjoyed having Jim around in the long-term. Enjoyed, not tolerated or accepted. And that was something else my dad and I found we had in common.

If I did anything for my father it was to help him understand a different kind of person than he was used to: someone driven by their emotions more than their intellect, someone more concerned with words than numbers, more at home with their feelings than with their ambitions, more comfortable asking questions that had no answers and more given to believing in impossibilities. On a lesser level, I think I gave him a gay man to admire and believe in, and apparently one of the last things he said to my mother, from the midst of a Pregnazone induced haze, was, "This has nothing to do with Stuart." He was watching a documentary on the Discovery Channel at the time and just assumed that the subject would naturally be my unchecked rise to success in life and love. This was from his hospital bed in Tucson, while I was in San Francisco, trying to start a life in the arts that he never completely understood but totally supported, primarily by forwarding me endless articles from the theater section of the New York Times. I miss those e-mails all the time now.

If my father did anything for me (and both my parents, despite being incredibly frustrating and annoying people at times have done unbelievable things for me over the years far above and beyond the expected handouts and child-rearing) it was that he taught me the value of strength, in regards to the mind, in regards to convictions, in regards to committment and fulfilling obligations, in regards to following my own ambitions and using my feelings, my passions, my deep emotions to fuel that strength. He accepted me so completely, even when he didn't understand me, and I recognize that now as the most important thing we can do for one another, as the thing which requires the most strength, as the thing which seperates the men from the boys, and which has often times, disappointingly, seperated me from a lot of may gay peers. Because while my father feared my greatest obstacle would be lack of acceptance from the rest of the world, I have found, in truth, that my real obstacle is in finding my own place in a minority that has adopted, on the whole, a subculture of exlusion, resentment, superficiality, non-committment, non-responsibility and in many other ways, obvious and subtle, a fearful move against being a grown up, being a man. And perhaps some of it is justified and perhaps some of it is not, but there is so little tolerance for a dissenting voice within the gay community that we may never be able to have the right discussions to allow for further clarity in this regards. That's assuming we even turn the music down long enough to try.

Things are changing, of course. There is a much wider variety of gay men out there, and beyond San Francisco, ironically, I think gay men are carving more and more for themselves unique identities and perspectives, and more integrated communities. I don't know if there will ever be a time when gay men over 25 stop referring to themselves or their lovers as boys (and all the psychological and experiential immaturity that such an innocent word can often entail) but I do think there are gay men, both vocal and otherwise, who are smart, kind, responsible, committed, open and brave. I know this because I've met them, and have even been lucky enough to date a few. And I believe that they continue to find each other, and love one another as best they can, as grown ups with grown up passions, and that they are the kind of man my father would have wanted his son to have some of his most intimate conversations with, in or out of bed, for six weeks, or six months, or a year and hopefully, one day, for the rest of his life.

And As Everything Comes Down Around You

2007-06-05T16:28:00.000-07:00

...there are moments when you realize that the only way out is through, the only way to get better is to march directly at the challenge and overcome it... stop complaining, my boy, and seize the bloody bull by the horns as you know you're going to do anyway.

Fay Grimm

2007-05-25T09:15:00.000-07:00

Saw FAY GRIMM last night with my friend Shelley and left the theater feeling oddly energized. It's no secret that I'm a huge Hal Hartley fan (along with Tilda Swinton, he's the only star I've ever met that I kind of lost my shit over and basically just spent the moment drooling and asking stupid questions) and have been for years, and while FAY GRIMM hasn't replaced FLIRT as my favorite Hartley film of all time, it's certainly reminded me that not all American film making is shit and that we are capable of making sincere, human, compelling films, even if we do have to go to Germany to get the funding for them.

This movie is lovely, so smart and subversive that it's surprising it's being released as broadly as it is. The performances are accross the board fantastic (and thank you, Hal, for working with Elina again, it's so nice to see her in such an endearing role) and the look of the film has that typical Hartley artistry all awash in stark but flattering lighting, vibrant blues and shadows and glowing whites. The music, characteristically intrusive, was also characteristically effective and the decision to dramatize the "action movie" moments with still photographs totally underlined the frivolity of cinematic violence and made the closing moments of the film so much more effective when they are executed in more graphic detail.

Walking home from the Embarcadero I was overwhelmed with the potential within all of us to create something in our own voice. It's so nice to be reminded that there are still artists out there making it on their own terms, pushing boundaries within their own canon and the industry as a whole. It didn't even dawn on me until much later that of course, very few people will see this film compared to all the people who will be seeing GEORGIA RULE or SPIDERMAN 3, but the fact that its been made is almost good enough. The fact that I got to see it, even better.

What follows is an e-mail I felt compelled to send out to friends today. Hopefully it wasn't too preachy...

Okay, so this is kind of random, but in light of how many political and arts-based forwards I get, I felt you'd all be okay with a pan-global recommendation that combines the two.

So, last night I saw Hal Hartley's new film, FAY GRIMM, and I just wanted to take a moment to urge everyone to see this movie.

It's a really important film, and unlike many other "important movies" it doesn't have the publicity vehicle of Hollywood behind it and will depend on good word of mouth, more than anything else, to get people out to see it. When your two biggest stars are Parker Posey (in a completely dramatic role, I might add) and Jeff Goldblum you know you won't be getting any Oscar nods this year.

Not that Hartley ever has. And sure, any of you who know me even reasonably well know that I kind of kiss the ground Hartley walks on but the reason is dual: one, because year after year after year his work continues to speak to me on an aesthetic level that few other writer/directors do and two, because he has staunchly remained independent, film after film, for over two decades now, developing his artistic voice and striving to say something rather than just churn out another Pirates of the Caribbean film. His cinematic signature is philosophical and intellectual, emotional and provocative, and he maintains that with few resources and no compromises on his content or his execution. For that alone he deserves support.

But this movie in particular is a statement that really needs to be received. And yes, I know we are living in an age where everyone feels overwhelmed by disaster and concerns of one kind or another, and that as thus, most of us, despite our education and tastes, tend to flock towards films that allow us to escape from those concerns for a while, instead of the films that will rub our noses in it. Escape is important and I'm not knocking it, but every now and then it's important to remember that the only true vote you have in this country, or any, is where you spend your money and backing good art is as essential as backing national parks, health programs and education. It helps keep dissenting voices audible and thus continues to encourage intellectual stimulation, social change and community conversation. I can't promise you you'll like FAY GRIMM, but I can promise you you'll have something to say about it AND THAT'S WHY MOVIES LIKE THIS ARE IMPORTANT.

A few days ago I had dinner with someone I love and we discussed at one point the general malaise that so many people suffer these days, the great American feeling of powerlessness combined with regret. This movie is all about that: futility on a personal and political level, individuals getting lost in the power-play between governments, violence reduced to snapshot moments that only become real when you're finally invested in someone and they just happen to get into the line of fire, smart people becoming overwhelmed by an excess of information that all adds up to nothing and leaves us feeling tired and a little bit raped.

This movie is also about hope, about little acts of kindness that remind us the world is not lost, about the determination to find the answers which may be in and of itself more important than if we ever do find them, about the moment we take things into our own hands so that we can at least fail on our own terms and thus exercise an act of defiance and affirmation of the human spirit. The tension between these two perspectives, the despair at things ever changing and the belief that we must try anyway, is as palpable as the film's aesthetic tension between being a scathing satire of American conceptions of international espionage and an exploration of how we retain our humanity through the interpersonal relations that are the threads of this tapestry we call society. When the shit finally hits the fan, as it always does in every Hartley film, and things spin out of control, it leaves you with an amazing sense of having been kicked in the stomach. And then it haunts you an hour later, the next morning, the whole way to work.

There are two women in this movie constantly circling the heroine. Saffron Burrows plays an Israeli counter-terrorist named Juliet and Elina Lowhenson plays a hapless Chechnian smuggler named Bebe. At one point each is helped by the confused Fay, who doesn't see warring political foes but rather a woman with a bullet in her leg and another who got in over her head and just wants to retire and get fat. Each says something to Fay that I think beautifully sums up the current state of the human race, and Americans in particular. From Juliet: "I like you. You're so easy to use." and from Bebe: "I knew you would be good." The beautifully frustrating thing about this film is you're not sure who is right about Fay, or about us, or about the human being in general. Hartley has always been so good at leaving the audience to decide for themselves and he doesn't fail to not take a stand here.

And yet he slyly does.

My afore mentioned friend talked of many things on that night, and one of them was the idea that we are hurtling towards darkness, that there are forces, maybe beyond us or out of our control that feed off our violent urges, our arguments, our dangerous thoughts and pettiness and envy and resentment, and that these forces may have doomed us to disaster. But then he also spoke of how he believed this could be averted, that we could turn this all around, if we could just learn to get over ourselves long enough to listen, to acknowledge, to help and support one another, to do something pure and kind, even if it was small. What I don't think he fully realizes yet is that his belief in this still being possible in all of us is one step closer to being there. Because he can envision this still, the darkness has not settled over us, and we can see ahead that thing we have been chasing, even as the sirens and soldiers come hurtling in from behind, as they do in the final moment of FAY GRIMM. The final moment that is not an ending, but simply a moment we have reached where the things we have done have culminated into something out of our control... but it might not stay that way forever. The darkness may not be sourced in us, but if it exists in the same world as us, then there must be something we can do about it.

I feel like this is what Hartley's made his movie about. And I think it's an important thing to remember, or at least to keep talking about.

A movie ticket costs ten dollars. That's less than two beers.

Happy Memorial Day,

Stuart

Johann & Krane

2007-05-24T14:34:00.001-07:00

Finally finished what I think is the last draft of THE TROUBLESOME HISTORIE OF JOHANN AND KRANE. Of course, now the question arises of what to do with it. It may, in fact, be the best play I've ever written, while also being the most unproduceable. Sure, it only needs eight actors (which is apparently gargantuan by today's standards) while WARHORSE needs fourteen, but where as the later has some fun and crazy moments, JOHANN AND KRANE crosses several time periods and more than one plane of existance and that's not even factoring in the parts with rivers and waterfalls and boats. Of course, a savvy director knows you don't ever need actual rivers and waterfall and boats if you really know what you're doing but I have less and less faith in modern day directors, who mostly seem to be film students mucking around in theater until their big break. The point is, JOHANN AND KRANE will probably have an even harder time than most of my work in finding a home and since I'm sort of moving past the point where I want to produce my own work it could be sitting on a shelf for a while. Which is a shame, because it has some of the best writing I've ever done.... oh tell me, Muse, when oh when will I find a theater company with an imagination and ambition to match my own?

Where Do I File This?

2007-05-21T10:21:00.001-07:00

Walking home last night, I had a flashback to meeting you for the first time.

We had been e-mailing all week. We'd had a funny conversation on the phone the day before. That weekend I was re-arranging all the furnature in my room, back when I had a room in the house on Fulton street. The house you came to call, "The Tales of the City House".

You were delightful. I knew this from the e-mails and the phone calls. You were that rarity of rarities, that urban unicorn, exciting, smart, genuine, with too much honesty bursting from you, too many details in your letters, too many thoughts in your head...

I was on the phone with Anne Heintz. I said, "I have to go soon, this boy is coming over." She said, "Oooo", that noise my friends always make when they think I may finally meet someone. And I rolled my eyes and said, "Whatever. He's smart and he's accomplished and he can write well and he's single and he's my age- so clearly he's going to be ugly as sin." And of course, now I look back and realize that we never exchanged photographs until much later. Our initial attraction was all through words. These days I don't even get past a second e-mail without exchanging a photos. Were we both just more trusting back then, or did we just know something was different this time around.

And months later, on St. Patrick's Day, standing in line at Tulan, you said to me, "I didn't know what to expect going over there. I just figured, if he's ugly we'll have a drink and a good conversation."

And I remember when the doorbell rang. I said goodbye to Anne and hung up the phone and walked down the hallway, that narrow, lightless hallway always crowded with bikes and piles of mail. I was wearing a gray dress shirt which I didn't wear again until the week before you left and I came over one afternoon and you were standing in your boxers at the top of the stairs in your house in the Sunset and you said, "You look fantastic" when I walked in but in those last few days it was so heady, so loaded each time we saw each other I can't imagine we looked anything less than wreathed in halos. And we weren't there yet. We were just about to meet, me in my gray shirt and you in a denim jacket over a blue and red sweater.

And it was close to sunset. The light behind you was blue, when I opened the door and the noise of the street kind of stopped. And I remember thinking, "Huh. He's short. But I'm going to be the problem here. I'm going to be the ugly one." And I asked if you were you and you asked if I was me. I said yes.

You smiled, and took a step backwards, and smiled again, deeper, and said, "Excellent."

I tell you I need to get a coat and you follow me back to my room. The light is gray. Winter light. It was January. You ask me how my room was set up before and I tell you about it while putting on my coat. "Where shall we go?" I ask, and you shrug. "Wherever you like. We can stay in too," you say. And I could tell that you liked me, but I couldn't quite believe it. I didn't know what to make of you yet, but I knew I was more curious than I'd been about anyone in a long, long time.

We walk down the street to Martin Macks. We talk about a lot different things- your education, mine, things we like, stuff we covered in our many e-mails, sometimes as many as seven or eight a day. You were unemployed at the time, freelance writing, home and attached to your computer for a large part of every day. You were fasting too. For a week you'd consumed nothing but fruit juice. You were chronicling the experience on your blog, which was crested by a picture of Max, "The boy from Where the Wild Things Are". Moments earlier, standing in my room, you had picked that book of my bookshelf immediately. You'd been so elated to see I owned books. I'd been so elated to see that didn't scare you.

We stopped at the cash machine. My landlord still hadn't cashed my check and I said, "Cash it, god damn you" to the machine, which made you laugh. We went to the pub. We drank a lot of beer. We talked about relationships (you said, "I want what I had before, but this time I don't want to fuck it up"), our pasts, books, medieval history (there was an exchange of favorite figures), music (you were at the height of your Yo La Tengo phase and brought me a mix of their stuff on our second date), Europe, travel, your writing, how you wanted to write fiction, even then, but how you couldn't seem to make it happen. I told you it was important to write about the world around us- that your life as a chronicler of the mundane was just as important. You looked at me with your fantastically colored Athena eyes and they were filled with this lovely mix of conflict and confidence and when you went to the restroom I kept thinking, "I really like this guy." And when you came back there was something so lovely about knowing you were coming back to sit down next to me in your red and blue sweater.

At some point I said, "We should buy more beer and go back to my place. I want to show you my Greek Mythology tables." I own this book and it's the complete family tree of the Greek Gods and Heroes. I really did want to show it to you. I even added, "I'm not using this as a ruse for sex. Which doesn't mean I don't want to have sex with you, because I do. But I tend to have sex on the first date a lot, and then stuff doesn't go anywhere. I'd like to be your friend, at least, I want you in my life, so I'm going to try going about all this differently than usual." You looked genuinely touched. Your eyes shone with that light that I've come to see as the moments when you drop your guard completely- so rare, and so worth it. You said, "I can't believe I met you on Craigslist." I blushed, and said, "You should be warned, though: I'm going to kiss you. A lot." And you told me that was okay.

We bought a six pack of Bass, I think, at the Cala Mart at Stanyan and Haight and we walked back up the hill.

In my room, I let you pick the music, after taking your coat and hanging it in the closet (a gesture, you later told me, rather impressed you). I showed you the geneological tables of the Greek Gods. I showed you maps I had drawn of a fictional world, city vistas and castle floorplans. We were listening to Gordon Lightfoot, "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald", when I kissed you for the first time. You were sitting in my dad's chair, the leather one with wheels a chunk missing from the arm. I left that chair at the house on Fulton when I moved. I think you said, "Wow," after I humbly went back to my own seat, and we laughed.

We spent the next hour kissing on my bed. I still had a twin at the time. Just seemed more practical for the cramped conditions of San Francisco. We made a promise to each other to not have sex when it became apparent you weren't leaving. We stripped down to shirts and boxers, and you passed out in my arms.

And sometime in the middle of the night I awoke to you peeling my clothes off and whispering, "I want you so badly." I think I actually tried to protest, because I wanted to be a gentleman. I also wanted to be a gentleman who had sex with you, so we did. And it was drunken and sleepy and affectionate and when we drifted off again, naked, sticky, I remember thinking, saying, "I feel twenty five." And you said, "you are twenty-five, silly."

We woke up the next day. I had a breakfast meeting with an aquaintance. You got a phone call, and I remember you saying, "Well, I had a date... that I'm sort of still on." I took a shower. I could hear you peeing in the adjacent water closet. I remember laughing at how much I wanted to impress you, and how nice it was to be reminded that you had bodily functions like everyone else.

We walked down to the Haight together. My breakfast was waiting for me in Cole Valley. I had loaned you a copy of Guare's "The House of Blue Leaves". I handed it to you saying, "Now I have an excuse to see you again," and you said, "You won't need an excuse." At the crosswalk of Cole and Haight you asked me if I wanted to come see a lecture with you in a couple days. And then you asked if we could see each other before then. And then we kissed goodbye.

And hours later, when I got back home, you had written me an e-mail saying it had been the best first date of your life. And now I look back and wonder why I didn't save that. But I think, uncommonly, I was trying to protect myself, moderate my descent into love with you. I really was twenty-five.

And now I'm not. But on certain warm spring nights, sitting with you on the streets of this haunted city, listening to you tell me what you're afraid of, what you're fascinated by, what you're hoping for, I am so very glad I was once.

Almost There

2007-05-09T13:42:00.000-07:00

So, with the first weekend of CERBERUS BARKING behind us and the second (and last) coming, it's exciting to think I'm finally rounding the corner of what has been a tough spring season for No Nude Men. The show, thankfully, is lovely, so much so I wish we had a longer run but the irony of course is that we did have a longer run but lost it when THE DEBUTANTE'S BALL fall apart (a part of the whole story we all seem to be forgetting now- even though it was only seven weeks ago). The greater irony is that a show like CERBERUS BARKING, while very enjoyable and thoroughly in line with what No Nude Men does, is not a show I would have thought to put together at this time, being by and large done with short play collections and choosing usually to focus this much work on a full production of something in the larger and more epic scale I seem to enjoy so much. And yet, here we are, with this small, wonderful little show that happened only by accident- I'm very grateful and mystified at the same time.

I'm also very aware of how my friends and fellow No Nude Men folks really do come together in a moment of crisis. Wylie Herman, Warden Lawlor, Stacy Malia, Cassie Powell, James Tinsley, Janna Sobel, Kevin Tierney, Claire Rice and Scott Alexander Ayres have all really stepped up to the plate with this one, throwing together a show in two and half weeks that doesn't look even remotely thrown together- and this is on top of James (and Gina Seghi) having put together an amazing fund raiser only three weeks ago and James, Stacy and Cassie all having taken part in the night of readings we did back on the 13th (which feels like two years ago). It's been really great sharing directorial duties with Wylie too, who has done a fine job with Hilde's play SPOON JUSTICE, something she's made it a point to let us know. Alison Luterman has also been very kind, praising my directorial choices for OASIS and promoting the show quite heavily (and quite flatteringly) on her blog. It's such a relief hearing that she liked what we did with it because while we kept all her dialogue intact, we did take a couple liberties with some of her concepts and I don't think I asked for permission with all of them. It's so rare that I work with a modern living playwright (the last was Nirmala, on BOOK OF GENESIS back in 2005) that I forgot how nice it is to hear another writer praise you for taking care of their piece. It makes me happy, and abnormally optimistic about my own work being out there.

Speaking of, Nat Cassidy has sent me news that EXILED will, in fact, be done for a weekend this summer at the Knitting Factory in NYC. Though I wish it was going to play for longer (only three performances, sadly) I am so happy to finally get a full production in New York that I can't begin to say how thankful I am to Nat and how surprised I am that he's remained so devoted to this project. I love the EXILED but it's not the best thing I've written and so it always kind of blows my mind when I realize people really, really care about it and want to see it done. Generally speaking, though, I'm always kind of astounded when anyone champions my work because, while I do think I'm a great writer, I just don't seem to be the kind of writer theater companies want to do these days. But who knows, maybe that will all turn around this year. A lot can happen in New York in only three days.

And speaking of New York, I'm happy to say I'll be returning there in September, a little later than usual, but it can't be helped with A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM about to go into production. There are plans to stop in Toronto on the way back, which would be fun, as I quite like that place, the theater scene, and the people I have met there. I'm staying longer this time around so maybe I'll get to see some good stuff while I'm in town.

Tomorrow night I'll be seeing ACT's production of BLACKBIRD, which is supposed to be fantastic. Doubtless there will be some blogging about it...

Another Opening

2007-05-04T16:16:00.000-07:00

We don't know yet what will happen. We don't know how the story turns out yet.

Wish Us Luck

2007-04-13T10:10:00.000-07:00

This Friday the 13th, at 8 PM sharp, No Nude Men proudly presents...

NO NUDE MEN: STRIPPED

It's our first ever short play reading festival and we want you to join us for wine, snacks and dramatic readings of nine of the best short plays in the Bay:

HOUSEBROKEN by Stuart Bousel
Marra and Kansas have a new baby-grand piano that is determined to redecorate their apartment.

DON'T TOY WITH ME by Andy Black
Action Figure sex. Need we say more?

STUCK by Mike Ricca
One couple on their second date. One couple about to break up. One elevator and a date with destiny.

LEFTOVERS by Scott McMorrow
Personal life lacking in pizazz? Maybe it's time to try cannibalism.

YOU PROMISED ME, PROMISED ME by Tom Swift
It's time for the Morgan Family Holiday Revue and this year Little Steven has an agenda.

LOVE, TERROR, ASTONISHMENT by Evelyn Jean Pine
A petite sojourn to Paris for some historical gossip and a film screening- the first one ever.

FOUR SHORT EPISODES IN THE LIFE OF SACAGAWEA by David Duman
Sort of like ORLANDO, but with a Native-American bent to it.

MOMENTARY VULNERABILITY by John Robinson
Carl, Dawn and Becky in comedy of manners so Henry James you expect him to have a cameo.

GEURILLA HOUSEWARE by Bekah McNeil
It's not a conspiracy. It's a family.

FEATURING SOME OF YOUR FAVORITE NO NUDE MEN ACTORS!

Scott "Nothing's Gonna Stop Me" Ayres
Felicia "Wake Me For The Reading" Benefield
Kirsten "Best Cold-Reader EVER!" Broadbear
Chris "Two Drink Limit Or I Get Slushy" Carlone
Lauri "Faster Than A Speeding Bullet" Costigan
Ryan "Best of the Bay" Hayes
Meghan "Looks Good In Blue" Kane
Chris "Taller Than Lisa Rowland" Kelly
Stacy "Likes To Laugh" Malia
Cassie "The Red" Powell
Lisa "Taller Than Your Mom" Rowland
John "Pass Me Another Beer" Russell
James "Still The Beefcake" Tinsley

plus special guest readers Randy "Keeping It Real" Taradash, John "More Famous Than Ever" Dixon and David "Making His Come-Back" Rice!

It's all happening at THE EXIT ON TAYLOR (277 Taylor Street in San Francisco) tonight, Friday the Thirteenth, at 8 PM.

COME AND JOIN US FOR THE NIGHT! WE'LL BE WAITING... WITH OUR SCRIPTS.

OPENING ONE MONTH FROM TONIGHT

2007-04-04T16:48:00.000-07:00

CERBERUS BARKING

Named for the famed, three-headed dog of Hades, Cerberus Barking will be a collection of three short works by three very different local playwrights Stuart Bousel, Alison Luterman and Hilde Susan Jaegtnes.

Bousel’s Polyxena in Orbit is the story of a young princess whose friendship with a talking walrus leads her on a quest to find Tolliver, the nearly-perfect boy who was banished by his father to work in retail on an asteroid far away from their home in late-Victorian England. Luterman’s Oasis is a darker, more hallucinatory exploration of another young princess, whose search for identity during an ever encroaching world war is beset by her glamorous but dysfunctional family, her passionate, volatile lover, and an enchanted forest of man-eating trees that wait for her arrival. Hilde Susan Jaegtnes’ Spoon Justice is a surreal fable about a trial between Robin Hood and a Mouse who has fallen in love with him in a world where no one is allowed to “suppose” anything and the local Queen has a bad habit of beheading anyone who gets out of line.

All three works use fantasy and fairy tale premises but take them in entirely different directions to tell entirely different stories. Simplistically but strikingly staged, the evening promises to be a unique collection of artistic voices that may be local, but are looking to tap into something from another world.

Directed by prolific Bay Area writers/directors/actors Stuart Bousel (No Nude Men, Theater in the Woods) and Wylie Herman (No Nude Men, Killing My Lobster, Lila Theater), this production marks the first contribution of No Nude Men to the 2007 San Francisco Theater season. The company remains one of San Francisco’s most prolific and consistent independent theater companies, having popped up again and again in the local scene since their first production of Edward II back in 2003. Since then they have been behind several premiers (Stuart Bousel’s Speak To Me in 2003 and again in 2005, Troijka in 2004 and again in 2006, and Love Egos Alternative Rock in 2004) and more than one provocative re-working of a classic: Racine’s Phaedra in 2005, Shakespeare’s Love’s Labors Lost and Sartre’s No Exit in 2006 and most recently the gender-bending rendering of Hamlet this past November). They have twice managed to steal the day at the San Francisco Theater Festival, first in 2005 with the premiere performance of Nirmala Nataraj’s The Book of Genesis: Remixed and Remastered and then in 2006 with Less Miserable: A Hot French Epic. They have done all this while remaining 100% independent both financially and by association and continue to harvest an underground theater scene that strives to push shoestring theater to its limits while retaining both a high quality of performance and an inexpensive ticket.

THREE EXCELLENT PLAYS- ONLY FOUR PERFORMANCES!

No Nude Men presents “Cerberus Barking”

written by Stuart Bousel, Alison Luterman, Hilde Susan Jaegtnes
directed by Stuart Bousel & Wylie Herman

FEATURING:
Scott Ayres
Wylie Herman
Warden Lawlor
Stacy Malia
Cassie Powell
Claire Rice
Jana Sobel
Kevin Tierney

Exit Theater on Taylor (277 Taylor Street)
May 4, 5, 11 & 12 @ 8 PM
$15.00
415.621.1503 or Endymion82@aol.com for information/reservations

Chris McCaleb Does It Again

2007-04-02T13:24:00.000-07:00

So, in his endless quest to be the most famous of us all (and in truth, he deserves it, because I don't know many people who work even half as hard as Chris does towards acheiving his dreams), Mr. McCaleb has recently launched a new project that all of his fans, former, future and present, should check out: www.promqueen.tv is a new series for which he a writer/director, the producer hat being worn by none other than Michael Eisner. The premise looks promising and VERY Chris McCaleb so if you're not keeping your eye on him, now is the time: pretty soon he might be to far through the stratosphere to see without a telescope.

Warden Lawlor Just Gave Me The Best Advice

2007-03-22T11:53:00.000-07:00

"When life gives you lemons, make lemonade. Then throw it in the face of the jerk that sold you the lemons and get the oranges you originally asked for."

And how!

Lord What Fools These Mortals Be

2007-03-01T14:06:00.000-08:00

We had our first reading for this summer's production of A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM last night, heating up my house with the large cast and crew so that all the windows were steamed opaque. It was exciting to be looking ahead to June but also kind of strange as right now the days seems to be very full and creeping by. I still haven't managed to take the down time I was looking for, what with one small project and another, getting settled at my new job still (though I passed my one month mark today), devising a new budget (this year needs to be the money-saving year that last year wasn't) and cramming in a lot of social time (which sadly, after a while, starts to feel almost as stressful as work and art and other stuff). Almost everyone I know thinks this year is going to be just utterly fantastic, a year of pay-off, advancement, positive change and growth, and I'm not saying it hasn't already, but now that we've hit the third month of the year the restlessness in me that wants so much taken care of, done yesterday and duly processed by this morning is champing at the bit. But of course, how else do you make God laugh? You make a plan.

And this is what I learned from having drinks with Sean the Ugly British Guy

2007-02-19T17:52:00.000-08:00

1) When people say they are interested in friends and good conversations, they rarely mean that on anything but their own terms.

2) When your first instinct is that someone sucks, trust that.

3) I really have to get over the part of me that blames myself when other people do things that suck. It just makes me look like a fool and my inclination to reach out and "fix" the problem is sweet but it's often not appreciated, particularly by people I have no investment in anyway. Just because they are a human being is not reason enough for me to continually put myself out there.

4) Drunk choices are never the best choices.

5) Confidence is accepting that sometimes I am a supreme fool and that's okay. At least I'm always a fool for the right reasons.

Legally Blonde

2007-01-24T16:39:00.000-08:00

So, as I'm walking home last night I get a phone call from Meghan Kane asking me if I would like to go see the preview of LEGALLY BLONDE: The Musical, because somehow she's managed to get two free tickets and she knows her boyfriend isn't up for it. Never one to turn down free theater (particularly in this current period of so not having any money) I agreed and walked back to her place where she made me some delicious pesto pasta and then off we went.

Now comes the part I really thought I would never write: LEGALLY BLONDE is actually pretty good. Not perfect, mind you. Some of the songs go on way too long ("There! Right There!", which should really be titled "Gay or European?" is funny for about 60 seconds but the song goes on for five minutes) and two of them need to be cut entirely ("Love and War" is just a total filler number and gets in the way of an important scene between Elle, Vivian and Warner; "Blood in the Water" is just not a good song, though something needs to be there for the character of Callahan, especially if you're going to have someone of Michael Rupert's caliber in the role), some of the dancing needs to be smoothed out, there's a bit too much scenery and some of the dialogue needs to be cut or re-worked, but on the whole (and by whole I mean almost 90%), the show is actually pretty good and very entertaining. It also is one of those rare birds in modern musical theater: something geared to appeal to my age-group, and for that I'm actually pretty grateful. It's getting harder and harder to find fun, entertaining, smart new musicals for the Gen X and Y crowd. In fact this, DIRTY ROTTEN SCOUNDRELS and 25th ANNUAL PUTNAM COUNTY SPELLING BEE are the only ones that really come to mind. THE WILD PARTY is grand, of course, but it's more of the arty pursuaision, like PARADE, and feels like it belongs to an older tradition of serious operetta. What was most gratifying about LEGALLY BLONDE was sitting in a hall full of hipsters (old folks were noticeably not there) and hearing them gleefully cheer on Elle's misadventures at Harvard Law.

It also helps that Laura Bell Bundy, the woman playing Elle, is excellent and really nails the role, bringing new stuff to it and making it very much her own. The same is true for Orfeh as Paulette, whose act one soliloquy (speaking of- where is one for Elle? Hello- heroine needs a character number, people!) about Ireland is the best song in the show and managed to completely save it from the pit that opened during the dreadfully bland "Love And War." Kate Shindle as Vivienne is also fantastic, and has such a good voice you wish they had given her more to sing. Viv is also, for me, the best character in the story and packs the feminist punch that made the movie more than just a light comedy: by being a woman strong enough to both have convictions and be willing to change them when confronted with a truth- even one she doesn't want to see- she frustrates the expectation that only Elle, cute and blonde and perky, gets to win. By helping Elle, Viv establishes that woman of all types must work together to establish themselves in a man's world, plus it just comes as a great 11th hour moment to realize that Viv isn't just going to be the cold, spiteful bitch you expect her to be because she's a brunette. The play does all this well, mind you, it would just be nice for her to get to sing about it more since it is a musical. The chorus of sorority girls is also fun, with Annaleigh Ashford being my personal favorite because... well... she really does look and act like virtually every girl I've ever known who went to UCLA. Christian Borle is a good, solid Emmett and has a nice singing voice but frankly Richard Blake is a more compelling male presence and I like that Warner in the musical feels a lot more fleshed out than Warner in the movie ever did. The song that he sings to Elle when they're breaking up ("Serious") is actually a pretty good song and her little soliloquy to him at the end of the show ("Find My Way") is even better and between the two there is a real sense of emotional connection that is both funny and sweet- the only really human moments in the show which is good since I maintain that musical comedy needs laughs and heart (not to mention brains) to really work. Amazingly enough, this show had all three.

And what a releif. Free or not, I wasn't up for another "Lestat" and happily, I didn't get one.

Spring Awakening

2006-12-11T14:07:00.000-08:00

So, this is a revised e-mail I sent to Matt Bailey discussing the rave reviews of the recent opening of Spring Awakening by Steve Sater and Duncan Sheik on Broadway. I should add a caveat that I saw the show while it was at the Atlantic last summer and that it has, apparently, been both revised and recast since then, so my original reaction of "Wow, this is bad" might be totally irrelevant now, but I found my response to Matt interesting as it summed up a lot of what I have been thinking about in the realm of theater these days, and figured it couldn't hurt to save those thoughts here, in case I ever wanted to reflect on them again...

Well, as a resident (and one of the reigning princes) of the sex capital of America, all I can say is that I have never been so un-turned on in my life... but then again, I do have a higher standard of eroticism than watching pseudo-teens pretend to do low-level S&M. Of course, perhaps SPRING AWAKENING wants to be more shocking than erotic anyway, but is there really anything shocking about the revelation that teens have sex, masturbate, get pregnant, experiment with homosexuality and committ suicide over their guilty feelings? I mean, really, don't we already know that? Why do we need SPRING AWAKENING, since it doesn't say anything new about those things, or even say those known facts well? Is the truth just that we need new musicals of any level to keep reminding us the genre isn't dead, even if it is becoming fairly devoid of meaning?

It is all interesting to think about though. I just saw HIGH SCHOOL MUSICAL for the first time. Are you boys (Nat Cassidy and Matt Bailey, to whom this e-mail was addressed) familiar with that? It's a Disney film directed by the guy who did DIRTY DANCING about... you guessed it... a high school musical. It is stultifyingly stupid script-wise, there is no acting to speak of, and the music is so forgetable that literally five minutes later I couldn't remember anything about it except some vague shadow of hating the blunt crappiness of the lyrics. But the thing is, HIGH SCHOOL MUSICAL was the number one CD in the America this past year, and has a top rated DVD out and even did a sold out tour with the film cast singing the score concert style- and they're now also talking about a Broadway opening. All this success must mean something, yes? But the truth is, it's totally bland, utterly engineered from top to bottom to remove any semblance of organic artistry or personal expression, and ultimately geared to be intentionally un-offensive to any musical (or aesthetic) sensibility out there- you can't hate HIGH SCHOOL MUSICAL because it would be like hating the air or objecting to the water, it's so unremarkable. And that, sadly, is the way of the future, because that's what middle America CAN get into (even Sondheim has only a few actual hits, remember, regardless of his international renown as a genius and virtually the Shakespeare of the musical theater world). And without trying to be sour grapes, let's be honest, we all know Broadway, God love it, is mostly engineered for middle-America. So they set the standard, not theater folk, and the more recent waves of theater kids are coming from middle-America and bring with them their sensibility. The thing is, as I was watching HIGH SCHOOL MUSICAL with my friend Randy, who is quite versed on the international theater scene, even he (far less idealistic than I and able to see the value of many a low-level entertainment) absently remarked at one point, "Isn't it weird that this is so ridiculously huge?". I too was amazed by the success of such trip, but not as much as he expected me to be. To his question I responded, "You know, the music is not even musical music... it's just easy-listening slotted into a story... but it really reminds me of SPRING AWAKENING, and everyone loves that too."

The trouble I have with just accepting that SPRING AWAKENING is yet another bland Broadway hit is that Wedekind originally wrote a play that attacked the standards of his time, changed the way people looked at children and opened up a huge social can of worms that altered the fabric of Germany... and the ghost of all that makes Sheik's musical doubly disappointing for essentially being easy listening with a plot. I don't care so much that modern musical theater has become so decidedly bland (aside from notable exceptions like Parade or The Wild Party or even Dirty Rotten Scoundrels), but it's really tragic to see a once visceral and terrifying social play be reduced to a half-hearted vehicle for bland, mainstream music that's engineered for people who listen to the top 40 count down each week. And while I'm not someone who believes that once the masses like something it's no longer good or has integrity or whatever, I'm also not someone who believes that just because the masses like something that makes it good or even important. Broadway has become so desperate to live these days that it doesn't surprise me that it will herald something utterly mediocre as the second coming of Christ if it thinks it means more tourists will pile in to see it. And I can see Broadway's viewpoint. After all, something has to support the staple shows so that the trickle down allows for good theater to continue on some level, be it in Brooklyn or Wellington, New Zealand, where recently I saw TURBINE, the first truly great original play I've seen in the last four years, easily (and I'm counting my own work in that). And SPRING AWAKENING wasn't bad so much as embarassing. Like HIGH SCHOOL MUSICAL it just shows it doesn't take excellence or innovation or daring to entertain us. If anything, it seems that these days we prefer the blander the better. Which is shameful, but such is life: we can't always be proud of our reflections, can we?

Fan Mail

2006-11-11T15:09:00.000-08:00

As HAMLET enters its final performances I'm starting to get that strange mixture of releif, pride and sadness. Releif because this has been an incredible show to work on, blessed with a smooth and astounding rehearsal process, but the nature of the show itself has drawn so much emotion and energy from me it'll be good to finally let it go and think fondly of it after three months of living with it. Pride because the show itself really is beautiful, one of the best shows I have ever directed and one of the best ensemble casts I have ever worked with and I couldn't be more happy with the final product. Sadness because, as is often the case with such things (especially here in San Francisco it seems), we have put so much work into this and yet it hasn't quite gotten the level of response we were hoping for, both in press attention and audience attendance. Our silver lining is that everyone who has seen the show has lavished praise on it and though many of our houses have been modest (three so far have been full but the rest have been small to middling) the level of positive feedback from everybody has been almost overwhelming- people are genuinely moved and respond deeply and profoundly to the work. And that is, ultimately, more important than anything else I think.

We have all been receiving phone calls and e-mails from folks who have seen the show but Ryan Hayes received (from his friend Janet) what is hands down my favorite piece of fanmail so far. I have reproduced it here for posterity with a little bit of editing (my asides are all in bold) and so that my magnificent cast will always be able to find it when they need it. To Janet, wherever you are- thank you. Thank you for coming, for being open to the show, for loving it and for letting us know.

Ryan (Hayes, aka Gertrude), I have to say hurrah and bravo, I REALLY enjoyed Hamlet tonight. I was zinging so much at the pub after wards that I actually made notes to comment on the play!

Apparently, Cassidys is the place to be since half the cast walked in shortly after we did (I go because its my maiden name and hey-they have Guinness) and I chatted up Guildenstern (James Tinsley) and Rosencrantz (Alexis Boozer) and they were charming as expected. They explained that their bantering before the funeral scene was nicked from the grave digger scene, cuz I wondered if it was added. It was so Gary Oldman and Mr Orange (Tim Roth, who along with Oldman plays Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in the film version of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead) . "heads!" I LOVED it. Thats gotta be the most spoofed scene in theater history.

It wasn't so much genderfuck, for which I was grateful, but more seemingly a useful way to use the plethora of women in theater when there is a scarcity of feminine roles in Shakespeare. .. for whatever reason, it worked. Young Hamlet (Kendra Arimoto) was just as much an angry young man with long hair and a skirt. And Dirk's favorite, of course, the triumph motorcycle jacket. I'M thrilled that she managed to make the "to be or not to be" soliloquy accessible and understandable without having to resort to modern speech. And the profession of love scene between Hamlet and Ophelia (Lee Marcotte) was believable, even heartbreaking because you knew it was never to be, and so did they. Wow. Many big time Hollywood stars can't pull that off, but your folks did.

And WOW, the EVIL King (Gina Seghi) wears Prada, she TOTALLY rocked. Those HEELS! Polonius (Lisa Rowland) was fantastic as well, as was the ghost (Chris Kelly). Every time these folks appeared I got real live chills. hehe.

Brannagh Schmannagh, you guys did wonderful things with minimal props. I LOVED how Ophelia's death scene became Insta-Funeral! Well...she's already on the ground, let's throw a shroud over her and call it a grave! Huzzah!

I do have to ask, tho-why were Gertrude and Laertes (Cassie Powell) allowed to live at the end? That was always that fantastic final twist where all the ends are tied up, no one wraps them up like they thought and EVERYONE dies. I get the feeling there was something going on with Gertrude that I hadn't sorted out...she wasn't just the sad broken dutiful wife we thought she was. I really enjoyed your performance, BTW. Hell, I enjoyed the entire production! I dont know why I dont go to live theater more often, esp works of my man, Willie the Shakes.

C&J, you have to go. Check your old clif notes from jr college if you must to get a review of the story if you need to, but This isnt your yawner-ass stoic "alas poor Yoric" old school shakes with a British Accent, this is full of fire and passion and angst and ennui and raw ambition and murder and hot babes in spandex with guns. How, pray HOW, can you go wrong?

Gratefully and respectfully yours,

Janet

Twenty Eight

2006-11-08T14:36:00.000-08:00

And on the morning that I turned twenty-eight I woke up early and listened to the fog horns and imagined the sound of harbor bells I wasn't close enough to hear... and the next day I woke up and found the country shifting and the world and my sense of where I was and who I wanted to roll over and find but bed kept changing sizes in my dreams and I wish for the most the things which may never happen or have already happened and are echoing down through the autumn like starlight...

Opening Night

2006-10-26T12:40:00.000-07:00

put these rocks in your pockets and try to swim

I am sitting in the dining room at Sardi’s in New York City eating a crème brullee when my agent suddenly says to me, “You are obsessed with death,” followed by “It’s in everything you write,” when I make a weak attempt at refuting her. She smiles, deeply, little lines everywhere on her surprisingly (for an agent) open face, and the smile, I know, is supposed to make me relax and accept her pronouncement without feeling strange about it, but I can’t help thinking that if she’s right it helps explain why she has such a hard time selling my scripts, why I always mentally attach the words “if I’m still alive” to any long term plans I make, and why even the people who love me deeply occasionally and quite suddenly run from something they always ambiguously label as “too intense.” Could it be that, in fact, I am too much in the sun?

I didn’t read Hamlet until the fall semester of my junior year of high school, but by the time I was seven I understood that I was mortal and everything else was too. Ironically, I came to know this in line for Disney World, and the realization that time was always slipping away made it, indeed, a small world after all. With even deeper irony, considering the play you’re about to see and why you’re probably reading this, I didn’t particularly care for Hamlet when I encountered it that first November, and when I was asked by Anne Heintz to play Horatio in her production at the Flandrau in November of 2000 I agreed only because I loved her and I wanted to act in something as a way of warding off my post-graduating college depression. Little did I realize I would spend the next six years contemplating this first exposure to what is arguably the greatest drama in western literature, but like any good ghost the initial stages of the haunting were very subtle and by the time I realized I was hooked it was too late to call the exorcist.

Flashback to Reed College, spring of 1999. I am in Stepan Simek’s advanced directing class and he’s asked us, in his charming Czechoslovakian drawl, to create tableauxes of actors representing “family”. Mine is a boy on a box in the middle of a ring of actors, all holding hands, some facing towards the center, some looking away, some looking at each other. The boy looks at none of them. The boy looks at the sky. Stepan looks at me and says, “You have a very dark sense of life. I’ve been meaning to tell you that all year.” I don’t bother explaining that since my elder brother’s sudden death in the summer of 1997 I have been more acutely aware of my mortality than ever. All I say is, “But this is how I think of family” and we move on to the next tableaux. This is three years before my father will pass away in November of 2002, two months after I escape to San Francisco, leaving my mother, sister and two aunts to cope with the noisy world that had been threatening to bust through the curtains while he lay quietly dying for months on end. I skip the funeral.
Any English scholar worth his salt will tell you that Hamlet is pervasive in the literature of the west, showing up in the work of Pirandello, Goethe, Beckett, Freud, Joyce and pretty much everyone else of note who ever put pen to paper post-Renaissance, from Dostoyevsky to Stoppard to Bret Easton Ellis and those guys who wrote The Lion King. Of all Shakespeare’s plays it is the most commonly filmed and produced and to play Hamlet (even on a stage as small as ours) is the acting equivalent of getting asked to sing the “Star-Spangled Banner” at a pro-football game: everyone will be impressed and one out of three people will let you know afterwards what you did wrong and how they could have done it better.

The odds are even less cheerful when you choose to direct it, which is why anyone who takes on this behemoth of a show either has to be deeply egotistical or incredibly naïve. As an idealist I fall into the first category, as a romantic, the second but either way I cheated anyway: first by switching up the sexes of the actors, second by cutting the script so that the ending re-invents the surprise that only Hamlet’s first audiences were lucky enough to experience. The way I see it, most people will be too busy either praising or crucifying me for these choices to notice my much more personal investment in the play and that’s fine by me: I don’t need more testimonies about my intensity or my morbidity. I don’t see these qualities as bad and besides, it’s not all there is to me and my art, even if I am here, once again, spending another November struggling with Hamlet. But that’s a good thing: some ghosts you are supposed to visit, instead of the other way around, facing them as we all must face our own mortality, laugh in spite of it and draw comfort from the truth that we are all temporary and thus all precious; that death is in fact the validation of life. Theater, of all the arts the most transitory and the most lasting (just as it is the most real and the most illusionary), needs must be approached with much the same bravado, Hamlet, maybe most of all. Certainly the Prince faces his darker self with pluck and so should we all. Ultimately, your shadow is your only true lifetime companion, so best to make friends with him.

I am sitting in the back of the Pilsner eating a burrito with an ex-boyfriend I love dearly. We are having a conversation indicative of us, deeply profound and charmingly flippant at the same time. At the moment I am talking a bit too much but an idea has caught me and I can’t stop myself. Through the half-light of the bar I see his weather-colored eyes focused on me, both inspiration and permission, so I continue. We are talking about how we have both come to be the men we are, something both alien to the past and yet entirely of its making, but the absolute truth I am reaching for escapes me so I end with the statement, “Regardless of how deeply I despair, there is some part of me that is always hopeful and always chooses life.” I shrug. It’s true but it’s not complete. My friend says, “Yes, I am the same way,” but he does not smile. Not about this. It’s nice not to be alone.

Three Days To Go...

2006-10-23T09:43:00.000-07:00

Let us once again assail your ears...
...on fortune's cap we are not the very button...
...for the apparel oft proclaims the man...
...and keep you in the rear of your affection...
...put your dread pleasures more into command...
...your visitation shall receive such thanks...
...cut off even in the blossoms of my sin...
...all may be well...
...that is most certain...
...but thou wouldst not think how ill all's here...
...how i was the more deceived...

Two Weeks To Go

2006-10-13T11:01:00.000-07:00

As stars with trains of fire and dews of blood...
...thou hast cleft my heart in twain...
...lord we know what we are, but not what we may be...
...the indifferent children of the earth...
...my stronger guilt defeats my strong intent...
...to cut his throat in the church...
...the houses that he makes last till doomsday...
...when yond same star that's westward from the pole...
...revenge his foul and most unnatural murder...
...to thine own self be true...
...to be or not to be- that is the question.

Three Pithy Observations of the Day

2006-10-10T13:32:00.000-07:00

Joy is a bi-product of commitment and determination; not randomness and luck, which tend to only bring about happiness.

If you don't visit the past, the past visits you: we call this being haunted by ghosts.

Sometimes, the deeper the connection between two people, the harder it becomes to just go with the flow.

Equinox

2006-09-26T15:10:00.000-07:00

So, it's a few days late, but I wanted to take the time to say that, now that the summer is over, I can say without a doubt, this was the first genuinely good summer I've had since moving to San Francisco oh so many years ago. For those of you not in the Bay Area, who don't realize that summer here is classically terrible for most people, I can't stress enough how much of a minor miracle it is to be able to look back over a three month stretch and say, "Yes, that actually went pretty well there." Highlights included hanging out more with Wolf and having some really great conversations; getting to interview a fascinating and daunting subject for a future writing project; finally penning a very rought draft of my stage adaptation of the Trojan War; going to Canada (which absolutely rules) and New York within the same month; heading to Ashland with my former boss, Jessica, and watching Jesse Baldwin do his thing in the North American Shakespeare capital; reading a ton of good literature and seeing some amazing theater all over the continent; and doing a bang up revision of "Troublesome Historie of Johann & Krane", which I just got to hear read out loud in my living room last night, where I also got to feed my friends my first attempt at cooking salmon steaks. No one died and everyone liked the play, so the summer really couldn't have ended any better. Here's hoping the fall just keeps up the momentum...

It's Press Release Time Again!

2006-09-18T14:33:00.000-07:00

Imagine a “Hamlet” where Gertrude and Laertes… live.
Imagine a “Hamlet” where Polonius gets to the point.
Imagine a “Hamlet” where Ophelia wears pants and the Ghost: a skirt.

No Nude Men Productions
presents

HAMLET

a play you haven’t seen before

written by William Shakespeare

directed by Stuart Bousel
designed by Chris Rader
wardrobe by Jessica Kuper

featuring:
Kendra Arimoto as Hamlet
Felicia Benefield as Horatio
Alexis Boozer as Rosencrantz
Kirsten Broadbear as Marcellus
Ryan Hayes as Gertrude
Christopher P. Kelly as the Ghost
Lee Marcotte as Ophelia
Cassie Powell as Laertes
Lisa Rowland as Polonius
Gina Seghi as Claudius
James Tinsley as Guildenstern

Climate Theater
285 9th Street @ Folsom
San Francisco
October 26, 27, 28
November 2, 3, 4, 9, 10, 11, 16, 17, 18
8 PM
$10 on Thursday
$15 Fridays/Saturdays

415.621.1503
or
endymion82@aol.com
for reservations/information

www.horrorunspeakable.com

The Matter
It’s “Hamlet” like you’ve never seen it before- reduced to a slick hour and forty, the tale has been streamlined and taken in a new direction, with unexpected plot twists, a reshaped ending, re-conceived characters and more, all while still using the original dialogue.

Approaching the story of Hamlet as a work of mythology rather than canon, No Nude Men seeks to show how one can still find new ways of conveying the themes and the gist of the world’s most famous play, making the piece their own while still trying to honor its place as a masterpiece of world literature. After all, if people keep re-inventing Cinderella, why not Hamlet? And who is this Shakespeare guy anyway? And did we mention the men’s parts are all being played by women… and vice-versa? Did we also mention no one will be in drag… well, just one person… but he’s a ghost, so the rules are different.

Who knows? We’re taking some risks here and it could end up total crap. But keeping with the No Nude Men tradition of content over tricks, substance over sensation, and never doing things the normal way, we promise it won’t be boring.

The Art
No Nude Men started as a one-off theater company/joke born from Stuart Bousel’s mounting frustration with the local theater scene and a series of projects he got involved with that never went anywhere. Determined to be a part of at least one completed show in San Francisco, he cut down Christopher Marlowe’s five act tragedy, The Troublesome Reign of Edward II into an 80 minute one-act which he produced in an empty room (what used to be the Build Space) on Guerrero Street with eight other intrepid actors who all wore black and white and performed barefoot. They ran for two weeks and were supposed to never perform again, but that plan kind of went away…

In the fall of 2003 NNM found a temporary home at Spanganga, where Stuart staged the world premieres of two of his own plays, Speak To Me and Troijka, and when Spanganga’s doors closed the troupe moved on to New Langton Arts, where another Bousel script premiered, Love Egos Alternative Rock, this time under the direction of Jesse Baldwin. Following a four month hiatus, Bousel returned with another of his works, The Exiled, which played at the alternative arts venue, the Xenodrome. After yet another hiatus, this time to write a webpage (www.horrorunspeakable.com), Stuart and the troupe returned in full force, mounting their first revival, of Speak To Me, at the Off-Market Theater in 2005, having prefaced it with an acclaimed stint at the San Francisco Theater Festival performing The Book of Genesis: Remixed and Remastered, penned by long-time NNM member Nirmala Nataraj. These two shows were followed with an atmospheric production of Jean Racine’s Phaedra mounted, in the round, at the Climate Theater, where NNM became the resident theater company. Following an elaborate, critically lauded production of Shakespeare’s Love’s Labors Lost, directed by Stuart Bousel at the Exit Theater, the group christened their new home with an all female rendering of Sartre’s No Exit, directed by Bekah McNeil and followed up with Pretty. Funny. Women, a series of women-centric comedic one-acts co-produced by Chris Kelly and Stacy Malia, who have both been with NNM since Edward II. Never a group to shy away from trying new things, they welcomed their first “guest director” with a new production of Troijka, directed by John Dixon at the Climate in July/August of 2006. Most recently the returned to the San Francisco Theater Festival doing Less Miserable: A Hot French Epic!, a comedic encapsulation of Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables. In 2007 they are already contracted to do two more shows at the Exit Theater.

Independent from the beginning both financially and in spirit, No Nude Men remains outside the general Bay Area theater scene and is unaffiliated with any unions or artistic collectives, schools of theater or production trends, existing entirely off of ticket sales and private donations, and making up the rules as they go while still accommodating everyone’s busy schedules and artistic egos. Officially speaking, they don’t exist and never have. Hamlet will be their fourteenth show.

To Be or Not To Be...

2006-08-16T16:22:00.000-07:00

So having just returned from visiting Jesse Baldwin up in Ashland, and having witnessed some good to terrible Shakespeare, I am both excitied and trepidatious about my own next project: a deconstruction of Hamlet featuring men playing the women's roles and women playing the men's roles and all sorts of other impurities that will either be lauded or hated but probably not dismissed lightly. Or hopefully not, as apathy would be the last thing we're aiming for.

The trick to directing Shakespeare, for me at least, has been to treat it like mythology- flexible and revisionary so long as you keep the key elements of the stories and characters and, of course, honor the beauty of the language. That said, even I'm a little put out by my pomposity- I'm probably more ready to direct King John than I am Prince Hamlet, but the later serves the current needs of our theater company better and besides- what's the nature of a challenge if it isn't something you're really not quite ready for. And why is HAMLET so sacred anyway- it really is one more play and at that, a fairly straight forward one once you strip away the hundreds of years of mystique around it. Not to mention the ridiculous amounts of pretension. After all, it is just a story about people. Or rather, it should be. Perhaps if more people approached it that way, it would be less imposing and more enjoyable to watch.

So here we go... the next thing... HAMLET gone amuck... and me, looking for ways to put balls down before I drop them...

Parting Ways

2006-07-25T21:09:00.000-07:00

There is this hug that you get when you break up with someone you essentially like but it's just not working out. It's very warm, and they dig their chin into your shoulder, and they wait for you to break away. Is this so you share the blame, or is this because there is always some part of you that reaches out at the last moment when it's someone you essentially like and are attracted to but it's just not working out? Is this because you need to say "goodbye and I wish you well" even as you are saying, "No, I'm sorry, I don't want you anymore?" Is this because there is nothing to say that can be said in words in moments like these? After all... it's all going to pale in comparison. So the hug comes in to fill the gap even as it acts as a period to the sentance that, otherwise, would run on. Hugs like these are rare. So is love and passion. Love and passion are worth living for. I'm not so sure what the value of hugs like these are.

Life In The Theater

2006-07-12T11:42:00.000-07:00

There are shows where everything is smooth from beginning to end and the show is beautiful and goes off with nary a hitch and looks amazing and is acted beautifully and far exceeds even your wildest dreams. My most recent example of this is Phaedra, where our biggest probelm was the photog who did our cast portraits turned out to be a maniac, and even that was more funny than everything else. These shows become legends.

Of course there is also the show where everything goes right from beginning to end and then the show goes up and it's just... lame. Doesn't work. For me, this is my production of Salome, which was stylish, seamless, tightly run, and totally flat and boring to watch. These shows are forgotten.

Then there's the show where nothing goes right onstage and barely better goes right onstage. For me, this is the last production of Speak To Me... which of course, some people loved. But those people are wrong. These shows become infamous.

I think most shows are like Love's Labor's Lost... they're good shows with a good process that has it's share of probelms but nothing major, mostly technical, pulling everything together type stuff but morale stays high from beginning to end and everyone puts in their best and it's good times and great cast parties and even if you have a clunky performance one night the show itself still feels good because it sets a standard it never falls below onstage or off. These shows make companies.

And then there are shows like the current production of Troijka, where everything is fraught with drama, where reliable people suddenly freak out, where combinations don't work and nothing clicks (but everything cliques) till the last minute and then suddenly... it does and it comes together and we find that it was, in fact, all worth it, if not better for it. Some heights can only be reached by narrow, rocky paths fraught with danger, doubt and ogres internal and external... but when you get there, the view is breathtaking... or at least, nice enough to justify the journey. These shows remind us that the theater is magic.

And as the lady says, we couldn't do it without the magic.

Too Busy To Blog

2006-07-07T09:52:00.000-07:00

Every time I say I'm taking a break from the theater, this happens to me: I am suddenly overwhelmed with things to do. TROIJKA opens next week and it's been a bit of a drama- not the difficult birth of the last production of SPEAK TO ME, but then again, John Dixon and not I has been the principal doctor on the case with Chris Rader in as his second, so my details of the duel are only partial. Without saying too much, all I can say is that if ever there was a time I've felt just a little naive in regards to a project, it's been this one, but that said I also do think we're going to come out of this on top- rocky roads often lead to splendid shows and it's always a risk when you give your work (and your company) over to someone else to helm for a while- but nine times out of ten it has paid off for me and I believe completely in both John and my company. So hopefully, they all discover the true meaning of Christmas real soon.

On a much sillier note, Ryan Hayes, Wylie Herman, Warden Lawlor and I have come together for another round of theater nuttiness, this time in the name of the San Francisco Theater Festival, for which I am both directing and starring in a thirty minute version of Les Miserables. Featuring our Love's Labors Lost set designer, Alexis Boozer, as Cosette and Fantine, Wylie girlfriend Allison as Eponine, my friends Carl Lucania as Valjean and Rachel Noble as Madame Thenardier, with James Tinsley as Marius and the Bishop of Digne, it's basically going to be 30 minutes of us looking like complete fools in front of, hopefully, hundreds of appreciative fans who cheer us on to victory at the barricades. I can't say the rehearsal process isn't tons of fun- last night, while filling in for Alexis, I definitely had one of those moments where I was like... "Huh. This is what I do with my time." But you know... beats sitting around playing video games, right?

This is apparently also the summer of adapting Greek mythology to the stage, with incredible progress on my adaptation of the Trojan War over the July 4th holiday- almost 70 pages of writing in three days, a new record for me I believe. The Jason and the Argonauts adaptation for the Cathedral School of Boys is also going well, though I had to make most of my female characters male and take all references to Jason being cute out. Understandable, considering this will first be performed by sixth grade boys, and of course, I can always change things back afterwards. It's interesting writing for children this young, though, and not nearly as hard as I thought it would be. Well, so far. The kids themselves haven't seen the script yet, only their teacher, but he seems to know his target audience well and let's be honest, that's more than one can really say for me.

Somewhere in New York City, Susan Wilson is either not reading a bunch of my scripts that I sent her, or trying to find ways of being polite about how much she hates them. Which reminds me, I need to get a move on looking for a new agent. Selma, bless her, has sent me some references and as soon as things settle down I should start seeing who, if anyone, will take a chance on me, even if I publicly trashed the new Dunacn Sheik musical of SPRING AWAKENING and everyone else seems to think it's brilliant (sorry Duncan- I love you- I own all five CDs!). That's okay. Lots of people like WICKED too.

And the sun shines down on San Francisco, waiting for the fog to roll in...

Live from New York...

2006-05-30T12:46:00.000-07:00

So, I'm killing time on my final day of being in NYC, mostly because I'm staying in Washington Heights and it's too far to go back there and yet still be here in Times Square by 6:15, when I'm supposed to meet Leah for dinner, followed by seeing THE DROWSY CHAPERONE. Also because it's really freakin' hot right now, something I always forget that New York can be in the summer. For some reason, my childhood memories of this place, which I must always confront on some level every time I come back here, remember this place as being perpetually cold. How funny, when that's essentially one way to describe San Francisco.

It's been an interesting trip- not exactly relaxing. Whenever I come east, with so many friends and family to see it's always hard to think of the time here as a pure vacation, and yet in many ways it is. For one thing, I can literally talk about theater all day here- it's so normal, so much a part of mainstream culture and besides, almost all my local friends are actors or theater related. And of course, there are all the shows. Not that I consider myself a Broadway hound but you have to love the diversity... as soon as you can get around all the crap and gross commercialism.

Speaking of, I wasn't remotely disappointed by the new production of SWEENEY TODD, which is pretty slick and very innovative. I'm so happy to see a major production of a classic show where they have completely re-visioned the staging, look, and interpretation, not because I dislike the original production (it's actually my favorite musical), but because part of what I think has hampered modern theater is its tendency to refuse to change. So many Broadway shows, when revived or re-produced, attempt to ape their original production, as if being an exact replica of a past hit ensures that the current production will also be a hit. Sadly, even when this does work financially, it doesn't do anything to encourage artistic creativity or freedom and it really doesn't do anything to bring in new audiences, but with this production of SWEENEY they couldn't have been more consciously moving in a new direction while still doing a great deal of honor to the text. A perfect blend of the two really, in my opinion.

On Friday night I caught a performance of DIRTY ROTTEN SCOUNDRELS, which I happen to love, despite my cousin Lenny's quick insistance that it's a waste of my time. Sorry, hate to be a boor, but there's something totally charming and just flat out fun about this show that I find totally irresistable and while it's true that it's not the deepest lake in the great white way, it's also pretty gosh darn smart- the lyrics, in particular, tapping into the kind of giddy headiness which to me characterizes good Shakespearean comedy- a comparison which might seem weird to some, but since I have done the reading and thinking to make such comparisons I'm gonna stand by it. Johnathan Price is currently starring in the show and, having seen him in Miss Saigon as well, I must say I greatly prefer him here- it was fun to see him having fun and he's totally charming in a way that I can't quite imagine John Lithgow having been when the show first opened. Sadly, no Sherie Rene Scott but Rachel York was pretty fabulous in the leading lady role and Christine Colgate may in fact be my favorite musical comedy heroine ever. And is it lame to admit I get a little misty eyed when she comes back to team up with the men she spent the whole play fucking over? I wonder who I'm thinking about when that part of me gets tapped...

Something I've been thinking about in general is the way musical theater works- and as someone who generally doesn't like musicals, it's kind of amazing how loyal and avid I am about the ones I do like. This is because I think that a good musical can nail stuff that a play alone tends to fall short of, without having to take things to the extremes that opera often has to ascend (though oddly, I think both straight theater and opera are preferable forms in general). It's also because, having just spent part of last night in Splash with a few friends singing along to showtunes with a whole bar of rabid musical theater fans, there's just something happy and wonderful about musicals, even the sad ones. Because in a good musical theater show, the songs express the deepest feelings of the characters on such a direct level- be that deep sadness, or deep anger, or deep fear or deep love, or deep happiness. And there is such an amazing joy in expression, even when what is being expressed isn't a happy thing. I don't know why I sometimes forget this and bottle things up or dampen them down... probably because I've let too many screwed up boys tell me that I'm too intense or let too many repressed people poo-poo my passion instead of learning to deal with it. The musical theater actor in me must remember to tell these people to fuck off more often- preferably in song. Or, barring that, well articulated conversations.

That said, when musicals fail, they really fucking fail. A good example of this would be the new Duncan Sheik/Steve Sater take on Wedekind's SPRING AWAKENING. As my friend Nat, who attended the show with me on Saturday night said, "It says a lot that they forgot to include the original author's bio in the program." Yeah, the travesty doesn't stop there, I'm afraid. Totally ill-conceived from top to bottom, this show is a wreck- right up there with LESTAT the MUSICAL. The actors range from middling bad to downright amateur, with people clearly not knowing their lines, let alone knowing how to deliver them, and performers lacking any presence on stage at all, as if they were just learning- unacceptable when tickets start at sixty bucks a piece. If I was running the Atlantic I would at least have insisted on re-casting the show, but it's almost impossible to fault the folks on stage when so much is wrong from a writing and directing angle. The script, which in its original form is fairly abstract to begin with, makes even less sense now that it's been boiled down to make room for twenty songs, most of which feel like total intrusions as they don't seem to advance the plot or offer much insight into the characters, for the most part. The music is good, I like Duncan Sheik a lot as a composer, but it doesn't match the story at all- an indy-pop sound that clashes in an embarassing way with the Victorian era costumes everyone has been saddled with. Far worse is the dancing, if you can call it that. I mean, it looks like everyone is vogueing- badly- and at one point in the second act I was trying so hard not to laugh I almost swallowed my fist. Then again, maybe I just didn't get it, because the show did get a standing ovation. Or maybe everyone's parents were in the audience that night.

On the non-musical front, I wanted to see the HISTORY BOYS, but apparently everyone else in NYC does too so I had to settle for THE LIEUTENANT OF INNISHMORE instead, which was good, though not really my kind of show. I enjoy the dark humor of the Irish but really, four corpses being hacked to pieces on stage- haven't we seen enough of this kind of stuff in the movies? Lately it seems like a lot of stage is trying to ape the Tarantino style of storytelling (i.e. as much blood, violence and sociopathic apathy about it as possible, all coated with as much irony as it takes to make it all seem relevant instead of just exploitive), and while I guess this should help bring new audiences in, the truth is most the theater was old people. Who, granted, laughed a lot, but maybe because this kind of thing is new and edgy to them. Of course, I laughed a lot too, but I didn't feel anything during the show and that's a shame. One should have a myriad of emotions with any given two hour span, I believe.

I rounded off my trip with a morning in the Cloisters, which were almost empty. This is always a bittersweet thing for me- medieval art, with all its angels and madonnas, dragons and unicorns and knights with sad, distant faces... Somehow it always manages to remind me of people I'm not as close to now as I once was, and of dreams which I still feel are a far ways away from being acheived. And it's not bad to be reminded of these things but it can make for an interesting morning... which beats a boring one at least.

Oh well... the rain it raineth every day...

Vincent

2006-05-09T11:58:00.000-07:00

Our parents are the ones who teach us how to tell stories; our lovers are the ones who teach us how to listen.

Note To Self

2006-04-25T14:19:00.000-07:00

...if it scares you to write about- WRITE ABOUT IT.

And stop being so terrified to rise above the throng. Not every tall tree gets hit with lightning.

Another Keen Insight...

2006-04-19T15:30:00.000-07:00

...not everyone who makes a really great boyfriend, makes a really good friend. Coming to terms with this is sometimes the hardest part of letting go of a past relationship. People protect themselves by cutting off the past or placing it in some kind of mental box- restricting its role to something they can deal with. This also applies to the people who represent the past, and this can prevent complete friendships from forming. This act is sometimes glamorized as "moving on", but in fact, it's really a type of cowardice, a base level of survival tactic instead of working through something and growing organically from your experience. Not admirable, but on some level understandable- we can't, after all, always face the past at every moment, sometimes more so when the past is bittersweet or ambiguous. Part of what makes an arist an artist- a writer in particular- is that we not only reveal the skeletons in our closets, we also dance with them, celebrate them, dress them up and revive them now and then... but it's good to remember that many people can't do this, and that while it's bound to hurt when people we love are amongst those unable, we can't take it personally. Sometimes the point is to have faith that on some level they will one day come to see it as you see it, and in the meantime to honor them as best you can by dancing with the skeletons they gave you, growing flowers from seeds planted in forgotten beds that you don't forget because it's your job to remember.

And This Is The Gist of What Love's Labor's Lost Taught Me...

2006-04-09T14:55:00.000-07:00

We may, in fact, have no other purpose in being alive, except to fall in love with one another, get hurt, and then try to learn something from the whole thing.

Theater Bay Area Style

2006-04-07T09:46:00.000-07:00

With Love's Labor's Lost down to its final two performances, I thought I would take a moment to discuss some of the performance work, other than my own, that I have been lucky enough to see around town the last few weeks. It really has been a diverse selection of acts, starting with a revival of Matthew Bourne's SWAN LAKE and
ending, most recently, with ACT's THE RIVALS, which I saw this past Wednesday.

So, first off, the "new" SWAN LAKE is really pretty to look at, if perhaps the tiniest bit top heavy toward the end of Act One. I'm not a huge ballet fan, but I'm beginning to grow a taste for it, and when it works on a narrative level I find I thoroughly enjoy it, it's only when it strays into the virtuosic that I start to look at my watch. This the case with SWAN LAKE, which is pretty riveting for the first 45 minutes, but a bit tedious once the swans themselves come in. Which is not to say that they're not beautiful and incredible, because they are, and considering how cliche the music from SWAN LAKE has become, it was amazing how seeing it live and in context I was totally swept with chills, particularly in the moment when the major theme is first introduced, but half an hour later when the swans are still just dancing... well, that when I started wondering when intermission would hit. It didn't help that the character of the girlfriend was the most interesting figure in the play for me, the only one who showed any nuance of humanity, for the Prince was all sadness and longing, the Swan all symbol and archetype, the Queen all coldness and sensuality but far too 1950's of a Madonna/whore complex to be believable as a real person... The second act is more abstract than the first- a kind of feast of Freudian pyschology centering around one beautiful moment where the Swan, now a Stranger at the royal ball busy seducing the Queen, becomes the Swan again for a brief moment he shares with the Prince- and I still can't quite tell you what happens at the end, except that the Swan is killed by the other Swans and the Prince dies in his sleep for reasons not entirely apparent... but over all it was a good experience, even if I did get the impression most the audience was there to see hot, half-naked men. But truth be told, it's not that homoerotic of a show, and the sexual tension is much more apparent between mother and son than it is between prince and swan. Maybe that's why an aquaintance of mine, also at the show, said he only work up when the swans came in...

The next night Randy Taradash and Meghan Kane and I went to see the 99 Cent production of MISS SAIGON, in which Meghan's friend was playing Ellen and Randy and I were just going as musical theater geeks who wanted to know what one of the most expensive shows of all time would look like done on the cheap. To say the production was fabulous would be an overstatment- half of the cast could barely sing, though only one actor, the hideous Erik Casanova, was actually bad- but it was actually really good. Jane Chen, who played Kim, was excellent both vocally and as an actress, and Dave Molloy, who played Chris, held his own as a singer and actor, though according to his bio he would be the first to admit he's not really the later. What he is, is an excellent musical director and watching him provide the music for 2/3rds of the show while playing one of the leads was pretty impressive. As for the actual direction... well, it was full of good ideas, many of which worked (like having Tam played by a balloon, or having Kim play the piano with Chris at one point), and there were some genuinely fantastic moments (like Kim and Chris singing "Sun and Moon" while accompanying themselves on the ukelel and the accordian), but there also were a lot of moments that didn't work and places where it seemed like entertainment values were sacrificed for "cool artistic ideas." Still, I'm glad we made the trek all the way out to Berkeley, and it's nice seeing something like Miss Saigon done on a black box level... re-invention is going to be the name of the game if theater is to have any future and these kids demonstrated a fairly effective example of it.

Far less impressive was NERO: OR, ANOTHER GOLDEN ROME, at the Magic Theater. Despite having a really excellent cast of actors and beautiful music by Duncan Sheik, the play itself was pretty blandly written, with characters you couldn't even begin to relate to and a story line you could barely follow, much less understand the signifigance of. This was in part due to a half-hearted, "meta theater" approach, more apparent because the aesthetic of the show (costumes, lighting, sets, etc) was like the bastard child of WAITING FOR GODOT and any given Bob Fosse musical, than because the writer comitted to the idea and made it a strong part of the narrative. Instead, it just felt like a nuisance, time that could have been spent on making the story and characters more interesting if it had all just been presented in a more linear manner. And frankly, if you can't make the story of Nero interesting, there's a big problem- because historically speaking, there have been few such fascinating figures. Alas, the show also suffers from being so overly directed that it collapses in on itself- the script to weak to support the excess of directorial choices, none of which make the play as original as it thinks it is. Ultimately, it just ends up looking like college directing students attempt at craming everything he's learned that semester into one play- and the play isn't that good, so it buckles under the weight.

Most recently I got to see the new production of Sheridan's THE RIVALS at ACT. This is the kind of play I think ACT does best- a period piece, large cast, broad strokes, etc. As usual, the costumes and sets were all top notch, even if Lydia's gowns were kind of on the ugly side- of course, in the time period in question, everything was kind of borderline ugly, so it worked. The performances were all good, with the exception of one, by Gregory Wallace, who I've now seen if four productions and who I frankly hope never to see again. He first crossed my path when I saw THE GAMESTER at ACT a few years ago and I rather liked him but the problem is he's played everything I've seen him in since exactly the same way and it really hasn't been appropriate. The other problem of the show was an overly long first act would could have been twenty minutes shorter, but the briskness and excitement of the second act made up for it enormously, resulting in an evening over-all enjoyable. The show's object is to entertain and that's appreciated- for some reason, smart entertainment seems to be on the decline and it's good when you find it, even if it takes getting through a laborous first act.

One of these days I'll get around to seeing a movie again. I swear.

Silver In The Eye

2006-03-30T10:46:00.000-08:00

...as it occurred to me on the subway coming into work today... why we fear intimacy more than we fear death or tyranny or any number of other things... is it because intimacy is the ultimate chaos, in some ways, chaos being the ultimate structure, but one so vast that it also allwos ultimate freedom- anything is possible? is the truth a simple equation that sex is the last frontier... is love terrying, politics merely annoying, and death simply too inevitable to qualify?

...thinking a lot about WUTHERING HEIGHTS lately... Cathy's love for Heathcliff as permanent as the stones... is Fosca's line in PASSION ("a love as pure as breath, as permanent as death, implacable as stone") a reference to that line..? ...also thinking a lot about immortal characters who are undone by love... Gilgamesh, of course, made mortal through loss, and the witches in HIS DARK MATERIALS, living only so long as they can continue to carry their eternally breaking hearts...

...will the ghost one day realize he is as happy to have loved me once, as I once was to love him?... will he ever tell me that again?... will there ever come a time that part of me won't want so badly to hear it? And where the hell is spring in San Francisco this year...?

...wrote the treatment for a musical comedy/melodrama yesterday... more excited about this than any other writing projects i have on deck at the moment... important question though: is it still a comedy if you kill the hero and heroine at the end? something to chew over lunch today...

Pretty Good Week

2006-03-17T08:22:00.000-08:00

A ghost returned and almost kind of kissed me. Here's hoping he stays this time, and really does kiss me.

Some kind words for the show in SF Station:

"No Nude Men productions adapts the rarely performed Shakespearean comedy “Love's Labor's Lost” into a highly engaging, whirling micro-view of modern day San Francisco’s drinks and dating scene, highlighting the interplay between wit, ego and the quest for partnership."

Let the world keep moving in this direction. Let the magic only just be beginning. Let this be a magnificent spring.

Chris McCaleb's Birthday

2006-03-14T11:35:00.000-08:00

So, today is a very special day indeed- as it is my good friend Chris McCaleb's birthday. Chris has the dubious honor of being my longest running friend in the world, having been on the radar since we shared French and Drama class our freshman year of high school. Of course, we didn't like each other much at first, but like any two people of similar bent forced to get to know one another, we developed a fairly close friendship over the course of the next few years, largely because we were always in French and Drama class together. When college hit, summers spent doing Quicksilver shows together kept us in touch and given to spending long nights of intoxication together, back when I still drank a lot and he didn't drink at all. After college it became more hit or miss, but he's come up to San Francisco twice since I moved here and I seem to manage to have dinner with him once a year when we're both in Tucson for the holidays. Other than that, it's been a life of Instant Messaging, but McCaleb is proof that you can stay friends with someone even through the most unlikely of mediums. Happy Birthday, Chris!

Love's Labor's Found

2006-03-10T15:14:00.000-08:00

So, here we are on the opening night of Love's Labor's Lost, and it's been a really strange ride. Not exactly rough, certainly not in the way that the 2005 production of SPEAK TO ME was just relentlessly rough, but not exactly smooth and charmed like PHAEDRA was. In other words, it was essentially just a production, beset with all sorts of drama, happily most of it external factors like people getting sick or personal crisis or what have you, and blessed with all sorts of luck and mostly just really hard working, creative and intelligent people who I couldn't be more proud to but putting on such a massive production with.

For those of you out there who are not part of my daily life and are thus not subjected to my regular monologues discussing the matter, LLL marks a really interesting moment in my life, coming up even as I near my four year anniversary of moving to San Francisco, a decision I can only rarely say without qualifier was a good one (that said, it's equally rare that I can say, without qualifier, that it wasn't a good one), and also being the largest and most elaborate and lavish (and expensive) production I have put on in the Bay Area and, as a single producer (i.e., without the benefit of a non-profit status theater company at my disposal and/or my parents), in my life, really. Which makes it all the more sweeter, of course, that my first two performances are completely sold out and as I sit here counting the minutes till the first show begins you can be assured that my nervousness is equally as tremendous as my anticipation.

So much goes into any work of art, let alone putting on a play, which is collaborative on so many levels and yet still needs a unifying vision to keep it coherent, audience accessible and focused on telling the story it needs to tell in an interesting and enjoyable manner. And since I have never been good at seperating my personal life and my artistic life- and I'm not even sure that I should ever be good at that for fear that too strong a deliniation would result in detriment to both sides- it can sometimes make it all the harder to let something go, be it a production or a person who inspires me, an artistic quibble or a heated intellectual argument. The part of me that is obsessed with seeing things through, sometimes even to the point of driving them into the ground, is stemmed in the same side of me that is loyal and passionate and forgiving, and sometimes seeing a production all the way to its end can bring out the best and worst sides of my personality as much as any love affair or trial by fire. In the last year and a half, as I've been struggling with a newfound vulnerability and insecurity that I didn't know I had before it crept upon me like fog over Twin Peaks, I've discovered all sorts of new things within me and in the world around me- some good, some bad- but most of all I've come to see how much I fight myself sometimes, how I hold myself to a standard that occasionally impossible and usually a little bit ruthless, and yet without it I'm not sure I'd be able to acheive the moments of absolute joy and satisfaction that I sometimes manage to acheive. And I guess I'm just hoping this is one of them, because I earned it, and everyone else on this show did too, and I know for a fact that there truly are periods in your life where everything works and everything is illuminated in fire and silver and music and poetry and you don't come to those moments without sweat and blood and tears and a lot of other ungraceful things (and oh how the last couple years of my life has confirmed that I will never be as charming and graceful as I once was because I just care too much about everything now) and this is the only true magic... this arrival by ardor and anger.

The older I get the more I realize I will never know completely who I am, and that I have also known myself quite thoroughly all along, and that there really is no reason to deny that ungraceful but well-meaning boy, because I've never been able to be anything else but myself anyway... but for whatever unknown reason, I can most clearly express this through the theater and so tonight, and every Friday and Saturday night for the next five weeks, I hope this show continues to advance that tradition, serving that purpose for me and everybody else involved, and helping us to advance along that path towards the next moment where the magic works, whatever that means to each of us individually.

And I hope the audience laughs, a lot, in all the right places.