Month: September 2009

Some links: 41

It turns out that Adolph Cluss’s handsome Franklin School, which I had noticed during a commute last spring, is the focus of some controversy, per reporting by Jonathan O’Connell. The city is seeking redevelopment partners for the site.

The school served as a homeless shelter until a year ago when [Mayor Adrian] Fenty closed it as part of his plan to restructure the city’s supportive housing services. The closure prompted protests from advocates for the homeless and Fenty did not hold a press conference to announce the solicitation as he has for other development plans.

The Laramie Project epilogue: an update: 2

We received the nearly final final draft of the script today, and we so we spent a chunk of this evening’s scheduled rehearsal scrambling to assign people to some of the new bit parts that have been created. Scenes have been sliced and diced and rearranged, to the good, I think. In one of my sections, in particular, the point that my speaker is making is much stronger, more sharply focused. Of course we already miss some of the little moments and characters from the earlier draft that we’ve become attached to.

It’s challenging—our production will be lightly staged (midway between the full productions and the readings from music stands that we’re hearing about), with our cast of fourteen seated in two rows of chairs when at neutral position, standing and coming forward to play the moments—to adapt to the rearranged script. We have only three more meetings scheduled between now and the 12th, and that’s probably the only date when all fourteen of us are in the same room together. But what an opportunity to be part of the evolutionary development of this text, to try to ride this bronco of a script.

A small online community of participants in the project has also sprung up.

Ferber decoded: 2

Edna Ferber refers in her autobiography to “ten-twenty-thirty repertory” theater as a turn-of-the-century popular entertainment of the upper Midwest, but she doesn’t tell us what the numbers mean. J. Richard Waite, in his Ph.D. dissertation (James R. Waite: Pioneer of “The Ten-Twenty-Thirty” Repertory) provides an explanation:

Even before he organized his own company, Waite believed the reason that so many touring companies were having little success was that they were charging too much admission. “James R. Waite, known as ‘The Barnum of Repertoire’, professed to follow the motto of ‘honesty, energy, and ten, twenty, and thirty-cents’.” [William Lawrence Slout, Theatre in a Tent, 1972)] Waite himself described his adoption of the popular prices:

The presidential elections of 1884 had precipitated bad business, and, determining to inaugurate popular prices, I jumped from Lincoln, Nebraska to Michigan and opened at ten, twenty, and thirty-cents. The immediate prospect was not pleasing, but the new schedule was continued, as it has been ever since. Confining the attraction for a few years to the smaller towns, I then began to improve the company and play better places. [New York Dramatic Mirror, 22 May 1897]

The general plan was to charge thirty-cents for the seats downstairs that were closest to the stage, twenty-cents for those back seats downstairs, and ten-cents for the gallery. Waite sometimes held “dime matinees” in which all seats sold for ten-cents, but most often he charged ten and twenty-cents for matinees. In a few cities Waite cut the admission to matinees to five-cents when that business became light. “The curious part of it is that this large and highly talented organization play at such popular-prices. As the manager said, there is nothing cheap about it except the price of admission.” [Portland (Me.) Daily Eastern Argus, 26 December 1894] Waite also varied his admission price by selling a special ten-cent ticket to ladies that admitted them to a thirty-cent seat. He used this advertising ploy particularly for opening nights, and tickets had to be picked up before 6:00 P.M. in order to get the cut rate. (pp. 73-75)

Surgery or bricklaying

Thanks to a reminder from The Writer’s Almanac, let us remember the birthday of William Faulkner. From Faulkner’s 1956 Paris Review interview:

Let the writer take up surgery or bricklaying if he is interested in technique. There is no mechanical way to get the writing done, no shortcut. The young writer would be a fool to follow a theory. Teach yourself by your own mistakes; people learn only by error. The good artist believes that nobody is good enough to give him advice. He has supreme vanity. No matter how much he admires the old writer, he wants to beat him.

Chafing

My example concerns a young woman patient who, in spite of efforts made on both sides, proved to be psychologically inaccessible. The difficulty lay in the fact that she always knew better about everything. Her excellent education had provided her with a weapon ideally suited to this purpose, namely a highly polished Cartesian rationalism with an impeccably “geometrical” idea of reality. After several fruitless attempts to sweeten her rationalism with a somewhat more human understanding, I had to confine myself to the hope that something unexpected and irrational would turn up, something that would burst the intellectual retort into which she had sealed herself. Well, I was sitting opposite her one day, with my back to the window, listening to her flow of rhetoric. She had had an impressive dream the night before, in which someone had given her a golden scarab—a costly piece of jewellery. While she was still telling me this dream, I heard something behind me gently tapping on the window. I turned round and saw that it was a fairly large flying insect that was knocking against the window-pane from outside in the obvious effort to get into the dark room. This seemed to me very strange. I opened the window immediately and caught the insect in the air as it flew in. It was a scarabaeid beetle, or common rose-chafer (Cetonia aurata), whose gold-green colour most nearly resembles that of a golden scarab. I handed the beetle to my patient with the words, “Here is your scarab.” This experience punctured the desired hole in her rationalism and broke the ice of her intellectual resistance. The treatment could now be continued with satisfactory results. (pp. 511-512)

—C.G. Jung, “On Synchonicity,” trans. R.F.C. Hull, collected in The Portable Jung

The Laramie Project epilogue: an update: 1

Saturday we spent a great day with Greg Pierotti of the Tectonic Theater Project. Greg was in town to workshop with the University of Maryland, Reston Community Players, and other groups in preparation for the simul premiere of an epilogue to The Laramie Project (which I performed with RCP in 2004).

We read a draft of the script (one from September 1) in sections, a third of the play at a time, and then Greg offered notes and other information that will color the performances. Since Greg did a lot of the interviewing for the material in this draft, he was invaluable as a resource to find out what this character sounds like or where another is coming from. He made it clear that one of the roles I will be reading on October 12 has the biggest, most emotional arc, and is also his favorite role of the 50-odd. No pressure.

Greg also went into some detail about the company’s process of building up a play from “moments.” Each 1- to 20-page scene starts out as a proposal and presentation by a company member. Once there are sufficient moments, polished to a certain degree, the writers assemble them into a running order, sort of in the way that tesserae are assembled into a mosaic (my image). Once so ordered, the moments begin to interact with one another and may require rearrangement and rewrites. Thus, in this draft we have evidence of the shuffling, as a speaker carries forward from one moment to the following but is reintroduced unnecessarily by a narrator. There’s also an incident that Russell Henderson refers to in this draft, and the draft doesn’t make it clear that it happened after the 1998 killing of Matthew Shepard—this will be fixed. At any rate, Greg reminded us that the closing line of each moment is a button, a question to be considered, a thought that tinges the way we watch subsequent moments, a challenge that may be confirmed or contradicted by the next moment.

While the company definitely has a story that they want to tell with this script, Greg says that they are fine-tuning the emotional temperature of the material, lest the enterprise come off like a crusade by the “Gay Avengers.” He gave some specific advice on how to play a specific laugh line (the joke is at his expense, no less): the writers are eager to inject as much lightness into this production as possible, as the last third of the play is rather rough sledding. “Laugh whore,” I think he called himself. More advice from my notes: play against the thoughtful quality of the text. More than once he told me, “X is very clear about what he is saying; avoid rumination and the naturalistic searching for your thoughts.”

He offered several anecdotes to illustrate the deep empathy shown by Fr. Roger Schmit, who echoes Greg’s own charge to find the inherent dignity in each and every one of these people.

Directory Andy and the cast will put this material on its feet with some simple staging, starting with a rehearsal on Friday. Maybe with a new draft of the script?

Kill your television?

Jad Mouawad and Kate Galbraith review U.S. residential electricity consumption. While standards for white goods like clothes washers have reduced usage substantially, the consumer electronics industry has resisted calls for producing more efficient gear.

The biggest offender is the flat-screen television. As liquid crystal displays and plasma technologies replace the old cathode ray tubes, and as screen sizes increase, the new televisions need more power than older models do. And with all those gorgeous new televisions in their living rooms, Americans are spending more time than ever watching TV, averaging five hours a day.

As a result, televisions and set-top boxes accounted for 6% of electricity use in the residential sector in 2005, six times that for computers. A 42-inch plasma device consumes 275 watts.

Make no mistake: other, less sexy equipment still eats a lot of watts. Air conditioning (18%), lighting (16%), and refrigeration (9%) are the biggest wedges of the consumption pie.

A mystery: 5

David Pogue prepares for a panel on taxicab technology, and along the way figures out something that I never quite understood: the difference between New York’s medallion cabs and “black car” services:

There’s a good reason why there’s no still no wireless way to let taxi drivers know you want a cab. Or, rather, a bad reason.

In the 1970’s, New York made a deal with the taxi drivers and the “black car” drivers. The rule: Black cars aren’t allowed to pick up passengers spontaneously hailing on the street; those people are for the yellow cabs only. On the other hand, in New York, you can’t call ahead for a yellow cab; that would eat into the black cars’ business.

There are, in fact, smartphone apps that let you summon a cab to your position, like TaxiMagic for the iPhone. But they can’t call cabs in New York. Why? Because summoning a taxi like this is against the law. That’s not hailing; it’s prearrangement, and that’s the domain of the black cars.

I don’t know. If I were the taxi union, I’d argue that the definition of “hailing” has to change with the times. Surely sending out an “I’m here! Come pick me up” signal, by Taxi Magic, text message or whatever, is little more than a modern-day version of sticking your arm out at the curb.

I also didn’t know that there are three times as many black cars as medallion cabs, but this makes sense when you consider the particular political-economic pressures that have affected the supply of medallions over the years.

Ferber decoded: 1

Although I am defeated (as many others before me) by Edna Ferber’s “The schnuckle among the nations of the world,” (A Peculiar Treasure, p. 10), Leo Rosten’s The Joys of Yiddish gives some guidance on the following:

It was Alexander Woollcott who acted as schatchen in the marriage between the novel entitled Show Boat and the music of Jerome Kern. (p. 304)

Rosten has:

schadchen

1. A professsional matchmaker
2. Anyone who brings together, introduces, or maneuvers a man and woman into a meeting that results in a wedding.

And, indeed, context explains this one. Woollcott and Ferber, attending an opening together, are hanging out at intermission, in different parts of the lobby, when Woollcott is accosted ever so gently by Kern:

“Look, Aleck, I hear you are a friend of Edna Ferber. I wonder if you’ll kind of fix it for me to meet her. I want to talk to her about letting me make a musical from her Show Boat. Can you arrange an introduction or a meeting or something?”

Mr. Woollcott, with a dreadful relish for the dramatic plum which had thus fallen into his lap (if any), said, musingly, “M-m-m, well, I think I can just arrange it if I play my cards right.”

“Thanks,” said Kern. “Thanks awfully, Aleck, I’ll be—”

Woollcott now raised his voice to a bellow: “Ferber! Hi, Ferber! Come on over here a minute.” Then, “This is Jerome Kern. Edna Ferber.”

Eclipsed; The Oogatz Man; Artist Descending a Staircase

Perhaps the theme for this review is “What is going on here?”

First up is Danai Gurira’s bracing Eclipsed: in a camp during the Liberian civil war of 2003, five women—four of them concubines of the local rebel leader and warlord—show us five different strategies for survival. We learn the ways of the camp through the eyes of the character known only as Girl (the masterful Ayesha Ngaujah), a teenager who has fled the town of Kakata (near Monrovia), only to be captured by the rebel LURD faction who are fighting against the forces of Charles Taylor. An aspect of the play that takes us out of our comfort zone is the language spoken, especially by the rural women. It’s a heavily-accented West African English with some creole elements (duplication of adjectives to intensify, e.g.), coached by Tonya Beckman Ross. At times, it’s as hard for us to follow the dialogue as it is for Girl to understand what has happened to her country, living as she is in such squalor that a solitary damaged book (a biography of a past American president) is the only entertainment to be found. Ngaujah confidently steers the wide arc written for her character, from doe-eyed runaway to the second act’s radicalized guerilla and back again, with even a side trip into comic goofiness. At the play’s close, she is left with a choice as vexing for us as it is for her: the way of the AK-47 or the way of the book.

  • Eclipsed, by Danai Gurira, directed by Liesl Tommy, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Washington

Later in the week we saw a pair of one acts from Longacre Lea, beginning with the brain-tickling The Oogatz Man, written by artistic director Kathleen Akerley. A story that begins with a simple premise—a man (Eric M. Messner) is preparing dinner in his apartment for his girlfriend (Heather Haney), with whom he intends to break up with that evening—but it quickly slides into a zone of indeterminate space and time, as if the imaginary force field he erects to keep her out of the kitchen has undergone a genuine power surge. Stair units at the back of the set sometimes take us upstairs and sometimes down; doorframe units are manipulated from scene to scene (by a backwards-gibberish-speaking building engineer) so that we see different sides of the same room; peculiar neighbors massage rolling pins into mind-controlling devices. It’s an ordinary walkup apartment building folded into a tesseract and peopled out of the imagination of David Lynch. Oh, and let us not miss Messner’s extended riff on the mentality that music takes him to, and the frustrations he feels trying to communicate that to someone else (dancing about architecture, anyone?), which leads into an ensemble air guitar session to selected tunes from Metallica. Much fun.

Akerley’s play is matched with Tom Stoppard’s Artist Descending a Staircase. Originally written for radio, the play does well in the black box of the Callan Theatre. The ensemble manages the scene transitions smoothly and with panache—and there are a lot of them, as the play (built from five nested flashbacks) is described in Stoppard’s script as having an ABCDEFEDCBA structure. The text has some of Sir Tom’s more provocative writing about art. Donner (the artist who descended, terminally, sometime between the A and B sections), says:

An artist is someone who is gifted in some way which enables him to do something more or less well which can only be done badly or not at all by someone who is not thus gifted. To speak of an art which requires no gift is a contradiction employed by people like yourself who have an artistic bent but no particular skill…. An artistic imagination coupled with skill is talent…. Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art.

In the end, the piece resolves into not much more than a shaggy dog story, but in the telling it is oh so entertaining.

  • The Oogatz Man, by Kathleen Akerley, and Artist Descending a Staircase, by Tom Stoppard, co-directed by Kathleen Akerley and Caitlin M. Smith, assisted by Mary Cat Gill, Longacre Lea, Callan Theatre, Washington

A little dig

Sly closing remark by Bill Poser at the end of a Language Log post about garbled entomology in a Customs and Border Protection press release (with my spelling correction):

The odd wording appears to have originated with Customs, in this press release. (Customs is now part of the “Department of Homeland Security” but I avoid using this name. Whenever I see it, I hear “Reichssicherheitshauptamt“.)