a nice little shot of brendan, tone and me taken by michael in oslo. i’m working on a new project with brendan and … with a little luck … will have the first pass of a draft done in a week or so. it’s turning into a strange little piece – a noir piece that still feels somewhat h.p. lovecraft-ian. keep an eye out for details soon.
drama desk nomination…
outstanding lighting design of a play, ben kato, “Washing Machine”:
not bad for a little company on its first outing…everyone's work on the thing was stunning! and ben's work is truly beautiful! congrats!!
norway. it’s a ponderous little country. it’s also stunningly beautiful! Wandering through the Vigeland Sculpture Park with friend and colleague – the always poised Brendan McCall.
having coffee with an extraordinary young artist we had the pleasure to work with while we were teaching in Oslo. Tone Pyromama Malina Brustad!! If I have my druthers – we’ll be working with her on a solo piece of hers here in NYC soon. I’m looking at doing a companion piece to it. Very exciting stuff!!
more to come very soon when I get some free time!
it’s been a while – but we’re now getting back to work on theatrical endeavors after life got in the way. i’m writing my newest piece in earnest (a roman noir-ish play with music called “Doghouse”) and Michael is doing a piece at the Field. And – we’re heading to Norway in March (my passport just arrived on Monday) to teach some classes at a school run by our dear friend and colleague Brendan (who did the movement for “Washing Machine”) – so things continue to happen. Looking forward to it all. Hopefully – there will be a reading of the new piece in the very near future. And hopefully Michael’s piece at the Field will turn into something that will have a life in the future. New projects and new experiments are imminent. stay tuned.
it’s a surreal moment for this little NYC rookie playwright to have his first Time Out review (as a writer) one page over from an essay on Atom Egoyan (”The Sweet Hereafter”) directing Beckett (”Eh Joe”)…both men factor into why i’m here in the city that never sleeps (unless you’re in my neck of queens) beating the proverbial (and sometimes literal) pavement in the first place. I saw “Sweet Hereafter” at a really important point in my life. It made a real impression and I’ll never forget it…Russell Banks’ book (which is exquisite in its aching simplicity) also was hugely influential in me becoming a professional writer…certainly informed the way I started the writing of WASHING MACHINE…creating characters as voices in a novel before starting to wildly cut and paste them together in a haphazard manner…michael and i constantly trying to keep our audience off-guard while never losing the narrative.
everyone continues to be great involved in this show and i wouldn’t hesitate to work with any of them again.
very cool.
Patrick Lee’s review at Show Showdown
Thanks to EVERYONE involved in this show for giving it their brilliant best!
Dana Berger is something else! Her passion and commitment was absolutely stirring last night. And she has found nuance in these characters that I could never write. It’s similar to the way a violinist finesses a strain of music. A composer could never scribe that kind of inflection. It’s really something else.
Do yourself a favor and come check this girl out.
Tickets for “WASHING MACHINE” are available at www.theatremania.com
Everyone’s scrambling around – doing their brilliant best to get everything in order to open this little show (thank you ALL – You’re all Mike and my Brilliant Best!).
Watching the first preview last night…it’s strange to realize – with all the ado and all the dragging of lights and sound equipment and set pieces about the white floor – it’s a tiny little show about a tiny little moment that effected so many people. It’s galvanizing when I think about it.
I went back to the Post article that started the whole process and was struck again at how someone as small and – in the grand scale of the universe…at first glance at least – fairly inconsequential made such a huge impact at the moment of her death.
We just don’t seem to appreciate what we have or what it means until it’s removed. Living in the city – I certainly find myself facing the terrifying notion that people don’t really matter to you until they’re on your doorstep or in your closed circle.
And here was a small town where a child’s death MATTERED! Painfully mattered! Changed the face of the town!
And I was struck by the mystery again. What the hell happened??? What caused this? Why her? Why now? Why in that place? What about that place brought about that tragedy? What was it about that unique collection of people that brought about this horrible thing?
It’s cliche…but I wrote the damn thing because I didn’t know and had to find out. I was sort of brought into this project – a sort of hired hand – but by the time the final draft came off the press – I was writing this thing totally for myself. To figure out why and how something like that could happen.
Because – in the midst of all the theatrical hocus pocus…it’s all boiled down to a five-year-old girl in the most desperate moment a human being can have. How would any of us as adults handle that? How does a child handle something like that?
I wrote this to find out.
And it all has begun…official opening on Monday…
“WASHING MACHINE” opens next Friday – June 20th! There’s never enough time in theater. There’s never enough space either – if that’s a comprehensive thought at all. There’s the chaos of rehearsals and the haphazard nature of marketing. And the unpredictability. What’s going to happen? Who’s going to show up? Who’s going to embrace the show? Who’s going to reject the show? What’s going to happen with the email blasts and the “flyering”? What the hell am I going to do with this blog? Are lights and sound going to work? Is the set going to fit through the door?
Is anyone reading this going to care?
And I’ll tell you something. If we get to the Sanford Meisner next Friday and plug in the lights – and they don’t work – or the sound wonks out – or the set collapses – it won’t matter. It won’t matter.
Because Dana could walk into that empty theater with nothing more than her costume, that pink bandanna, and a boom-box for underscoring and you’ll see something remarkable. Remarkable.
I got into theatre for the unpredictability. I got into theatre because of its immediacy and because of its potential to exhilarate and because of its potential to fail. You fail in most any other creative medium – you edit or you cut around it or you paint over it. In theatre – you breathe the same air as the people who are performing in front of you. And if you fail – but you fail with conviction – it can be just as enthralling as a success. I don’t know if I can completely qualify or explain that in an effective manner. I can only explain by example. How many productions have I seen where an actor went up on their lines? Countless. And more than once I have watched them flounder. But I have also seen some of them use the failure – use the mistake – and create a moment of character that I could never script. They play indecision or they play insecurity. They commit to their circumstance and they use every moment to its fullest.
Where else can you do that? Where else can you use unpredictability? Theatre wants to evade expectation. Theatre wants to revel in the fact that you do not know what’s coming.
“WASHING MACHINE” deals with so much of this. The antagonist of the piece is circumstance. The very fact that we are often at the mercy of things we have no control over. We are blessed and cursed by what we can’t predict.
Come and see the show and you’ll see what I’m talking about. We open on the 20th of June and run thru July 19th. Everyone involved is fantastic! I’m really proud of the work we’ve done here.
(STEP-BROTHER is a young adolescent with a rather volatile fascination with zombies)
SHIT! SHIT! Did you see that? He put that spear through the fucker’s head. Schwck! SPLAT! Leguizamo was pinned down in that abandoned shop…and the zombie was holding him down…and I thought he was fucked…zombie food, man…and Leguizamo put that spear through the fucker’s head! Schwck…SPLAT!
Yeah. It was cool. Not as cool as “Dawn Of The Dead” where the zombie bit that woman’s shoulder off. Woah! I couldn’t fucking sleep the night after I saw that. Snuck into the drive-through in the back of Chip’s pick-up – under the tarp.
That was scary. And the bikers. Bikers were as creepy as the zombies.
SHIT! But that spear through the fucker’s head! That was AWESOME!
(silences)
They started thinking. The zombies started thinking in this one. And that freaks me out. Seems the only thing that would make being a zombie okay is that you couldn’t think at all. You just eat and shit. And get your head blown off or sliced in two by some short hispanic with a spear gun.
Do they know they’re zombies? Do they know they can’t be people again?
shit.
I can’t think of anything scarier. Knowing you can’t be people again. Knowing you can’t feel good again.
(Over the next few weeks, I plan to blog in the voice of the characters from Fist In The Pocket’s upcoming production of “WASHING MACHINE”. I’ll find a theme – something that catches my fancy – and then I’ll blog about it from two perspectives. I’ll blog from the perspective of myself – which will be posted at THE EPHEMERAL
And then I’ll blog from the perspective of the characters here at fistinthepocket.wordpress.com
Tickets for “WASHING MACHINE” are available at www.theatremania.com
