Reading tomorrow

So my new play, as blogged about two months ago, now has a name: Self-Inflicted Wounds. And it's being read tomorrow night. Nice.

I started work on this piece right after we finished up with Happy Days last August . . . it started out as one thing and then over the course of the last seven or eight months has become something distinctly different.

It will be interesting to hear it read tomorrow night and maybe to see what folks think about it, if anything!

A lot of work and major changes . . . it doesn't look much like it started out . . . but that's par for the course. You get your ideas down and then you start to refine them . . . this started out as a 60+ page piece and now it's at about 35 . . . and not much in that 35 was part of the original piece.

Sure looks easy when it's up there on stage . . . sure ain't easy to get it there!

When I was doing that audition a few weeks back I had occasion to look at an early version of Old Hickory . . . amazing how different it was from the piece I've performed so many times.

But that's the journey . . . and it never stops.

Speaking of which . . . I'm bapping around ideas for a new piece . . . I took a brief bit into the workshop last week to see how it went . . . it was encouraging.

So now? The reading tomorrow and then I can chill a bit. Write when I want to, read the Power Broker . . . and generally kick back (well. . . working for a living figures in there as well)

A new post about a new play

I have a new play that I've been working on for the past five or six months, though it's been in my head a bit longer than that. I got the idea, or at least the germ of the idea while reading The Brothers Karamazov last summer. There was a chapter in which a wealthy businessman confesses to a crime that someone else was blamed for and no one believes him. That got me thinking. And then I read an oral history of the sixties called Witness to the Revolution and the two just sort of came together. While I was working on this piece last fall with the idea that the crime these guys had committed was a bombing in which innocent people were killed, I read about one of the people who robbed the Brinks truck in Nyack in the early 80's and how she was trying to get out of prison, but not everyone is happy about that.

At any rate all those elements lead me over the last months to what I have now. It's not in finished form right now but it's at least has a beginning and an ending. I have asked for a May 25 reading slot so that gives me plenty of time to get it ready. We'll see. I had originally thought of it as two acts but right now I'm settling in on a long one act . . . it's 37 pages right now so we'll see where it ends up. With the political upheaval that we are living through right now the timing might be right!

The play involves two guys who were involved with a robbery like the Brinks one, and they haven't been found out. One is living off the grid and the other is successful, with a wife and kids and a business. The successful one finds his old friend and tells him he wants to speak on behalf of their imprisoned cohort.

I have been through the ringer with this one. It went from the bombing idea to the armored car theft idea and I'm hoping it's something I'll be happy with when all is said and done. Right now I'm at about medium on the happiness scale, but I plan to get back at it this weekend and see if I can tip the scales in the happier direction!

Damage Control through the years

The upcoming reading of Damage Control has brought back a lot of memories of the life of the play, not all of them pleasant. So I thought it was worth a post. I don't remember exactly what set me off on the path of writing this play, but in its infancy it was originally a solo piece. A guy alone in a room with a phone awaiting a call that he could let his victim (a young lady) go,or otherwise. He'd get a call on the hour, which was a signal: one ring everything was ok, two rings the ransom had been paid and he could let her go . . . or three rings . . .which wasn't good. Needless to say with each ring of the phone he got a little crazier. For whatever reason (shame I wasn't blogging at the time)I decided to make it two characters, and then it morphed to three when I added the victim bound to a chair. The two main characters are an inexperienced kidnapper working off a gambling debt, and a more seasoned enforcer who is there to see things through to the end and to clean up any messes that might ensue, or as he says, he is damage control.

The play came to life pretty quickly, as I remember it. Aside from my usual theater influences, this one owes a lot to good ole Sam Peckinpah, whose films, while flawed, held nothing back. (The director of this reading likened it to Tarantino, which I can see as well).

Damage Control was my second full length play, coming on the heels of Last Request.

At any rate, I entered into competitions and eventually sent it to Jerry Davis at Burning Coal Theater in Raleigh, NC. He and I had met while working on The Trip to Bountiful with Ellen Burstyn.

Jerry offered to have a staged reading and flew me down there for the weekend. It was a wonderful experience, complete with interview for the local paper and I got a lot out of it. Most notably I saw the impact that the play could have on an audience.

After that a pause in the action for this one . . . I was writing other plays and sending this one out I suppose, at any rate the next action came in 2002, with a reading as part of the TRU Voices series, this time in NYC. The director was Jules Ochoa, and Jules found the actors. The guy who played the inexperienced kidnapper was amazing. Great energy. A real high tension wire. The young lady who played the girl was funny because she, though she had no lines to speak of, was so into it . . . ah actors!

This reading was in a 99 seat theater that was packed and round two for this play showed yet again the kind of reaction you could achieve . . . everybody was glued to their seats.

Very nice feedback as well.

Then things went to a place . . . well lets just say it's a great example of what working with friends can cost you. The producer of the TRU reading was a very good friend of mine. He wanted to produce the play god-bless-him and we had another reading for the artistic director at the Rattlestick Theater (with the same cast and director as TRU) . . . then things went off the rails . . . my friend started listening to a guy who was involved in film, and what a wonderful film this would make (it would, I had even written a screenplay already and entered into the Project Greenlight competition). To make a long story short: the film guy was a tad duplicitous, my friend and I ended up with a very damaged relationship, and the whole thing culminated in a rare explosion on my part over what the film guy wanted to do with my play.

Not a happy story, but as my friend Angelo Parra said not long after this debacle: better the script is gathering dust on a shelf than you have a film you're not embarrassed by.

Since then I have entered the piece from time to time in various competitions, but not much play until the Monsterpiece Theater Collective opted to present it. So away we go. It'll be interesting to see what they do with it. I've yet to meet anyone involved and am not able to get to rehearsals, so this will be the least engaged I've been with one of my readings, and we'll just see what happens.

The director of this reading, Kate Tenetko, speaks highly of it. It'll be interesting to see how having a woman directing will influence the piece. The inexperienced kidnapper is a bit of a cad, with a very unhealthy view of women. Should make for an interesting perspective.

The least that could happen is that a suspenseful good time will be had by all!

I'm attaching the photo I took for the flyer for the reading. I think it is very evocative. I took it in the basement on a sunny day, the noonday sun blasting through the window above the chair. Nice image and perfect for the piece.

The final weekend

It's Thursday morning. This evening is the first performance of our final weekend at Byrdcliffe. There isn't a person among us (us being Bette, Wallace and I) that wouldn't like more life for this production, but for now we will kill it four more times and then move on.

It may be redundant to express what a thrill ride this has been. Two weeks in Woodstock rehearsing leading up to the opening . . . the feedback we got referring our production to the top of the heap (and comparing Bette's performance to Billie Whitelaw!) . . . then the night the lights went out and we persevered anyway . . . amazing stuff.

As Winnie would say: 'And now?'

So here we go. There will be much to cherish forever with this production. Much that will linger on. A new frame of reference for what theater can be and how it can communicate. It's what we all strive for. As another Beckett heroine says: 'More!'

Opening night of Happy Days

We have one performance under our belts now. It went very well indeed. I thought Willie would get more in the way of laughs, and there were some, but a) I didn't push for them and b)the audience was into it and very moved by the entire thing. So it accomplished what we hoped to. I had one small line glitch, but no one noticed it I think . . . I'll have to on my toes, not enough lines to screw one up, but having said that the glitch involved adding to, not taking away.

There is so much love and commitment in the air, it's just an amazing event for all concerned . . . and when we can pass that along to the audience it's magic.

Building the mound

Well I thought that building the mound for Happy Days was gonna be a long drawn out process . . . but the wizard Bob McBroom is amazing. He had the entire thing figured out so he could just put the pieces together when he got to the theater. It was like building an erector set. From getting to the theater to leaving with a fully assembled mound was about two hours (and that involved some ooh and ahh time as well). So today we will start rehearing on the set and after rehearsal McB will come in with Chester, his helper and start to shape it and paint it . . . this is going to really be something else!

The home stretch for Happy Days!

We had our last rehearsal at Wallace's studio today and on Monday we move into the theater! Pretty f'n exciting! We've been in Woodstock for the last week rehearsing every day and it has paid off in spades. This is going to be a pretty amazing event and I can't wait to get it up and running. Which of course is bitter sweet because we have been working on this for over a year now, and seriously rehearsing since October, so it has been a most intense ride . . . but I wouldn't trade it for anything. This has been a profound experience and, while it will be an intense next few days, this production should kinda blow people's minds.

This is the third time I've worked with Wallace in Woodstock and I'd say the third time is the charm, but they have ALL been charmed experiences. This collaboration is something that you can't just create, it happens through a series of events that lead one to another and then . . . magic happens . . . I could write a book . . . maybe some day I will!!!