SlowLearner

TRUJ THAT

I'm sorry, I just need to pop back in and point to Mr. Excitement's list of announcements, which includes the very good news that Dan Trujillo is back with a new play! Mark will direct a reading at the Dramatists Guild on September 24. According to Mark, the piece is partially inspired by recent theatrosphere flamewars. Trujillo was the guy who, all the way back in January of this year, told me there was no percentage in getting involved in blogfights. I ignored him, and look at me now! I'm definitely checking this out.

--SlowLearner

BACK SOON

I won't be posting any more this week, due to a bunch of non-theater obligations catching up with me. I'll be back next week.

--SlowLearner

OUTSTANDING

Did I say 61 people at one show? I meant to say 141 people, boyz!

And things went well for us at the closing night party as well, as seen here. I had a few homies make out as well, including Gus Schulenberg's gorgeous Riding The Bull and Naomi Emmerson's reportedly awesome Piaf: Love Conquers All, and I say "reportedly" because when I saw it, I was turned away along with about a zillion other people 'cause the house was stuffed to the gills.

Fortunately, both shows have been selected for the Fringe Encores series, so folks who missed them will get eight more chances. Seriously: SEE RIDING THE BULL. You actually will both laugh and cry. I hope to have a similarly ardent recommendation for Piaf after I see it next week. I did see Naomi sing a bit of it at the Fringe Previews, and she sings like a freakin' bird-goddess.

I'll have a retrospective of the Fringe and my summer as a whole up later this week.

--SlowLearner

LAST CHANCE FOR SATAN!

Well, it's been a hell of a run for HAIL SATAN. Great houses, tons of reviews and coverage, great response... I saw Nosedive's quintessential Steph at the Wednesday night show, and I was telling her how tired I am, and she reminded me that lots of folks would like to have my problems. It's been a great summer, sleep deprivation and all.

Was I talking about thoughtful, engaged writeups? Well, then, much thanks to Jimmy, Freeman, and this guy for their thoughts and kindness.

And I gotta say, it felt awful nice to get home last night to this in Backstage. Props for everyone in Gideon, and even my girlfriend got a shout-out at the end!

Tonight will be a special occasion for me. There are 61 presold tickets to HAIL SATAN tonight. Now, that's nowhere near sold out, as the Bleecker Street Theater seats 200, but that represents my personal best as a solo playwright (rather than as a book-writer of a musical or the writer of one short piece in night of short pieces). 61 people at one show! Probably more, 'cause a couple dudes'll probably buy at the door! Pretty sweet, G.

It's also been a nice summer as a spectator. This past weekend I saw two splendid Fringe shows, August Schulenberg's heartbreaking (not to mention incredibly funny) RIDING THE BULL, which had the audience I was with alternately in stitches or spellbound, and Anna Kull and Justin Perkins' astonishing feat, DRESSING MISS JULIE.

Outside the festival, I also saw the legendary Sharon Fogarty's PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A DUMB BLONDE. A new Sharon Fogarty musical is always a treat, to be in the hands of a truly idiosyncratic artist of genuine feeling who speaks a thoroughly personal language of music and stage physicality. The key to understanding Sharon's work is to recognize that she's unashamed of revealing her influences, and sometimes quotes them directly, but always rearranges them through her sensibility. PORTRAIT isn't quite the equal of her great HOW TO SEE IN THE DARK, but it was still a gripping portrait of a woman learning to channel the forces of grief and self-pity into useful tools she can use to pull herself back into life.

Anyway, 7:15 tonight is your last chance to catch HAIL SATAN! Click here for details. Post-mortem right here next week.

--SlowLearner

CHEERZ N' JEERZ

I know sometimes we on the theatrosphere talk about our reactions to reviews and reviewers. Over this summer, I've had a little first-hand experience with this. I've had a few raves, a few pleasant so-so's, and - well, no out-and-out pans so far, but a couple that were far more luke than warm.

I'm kinda still at the stage that I was in the summer of 2005, when we did FLEET WEEK, and I was mostly just psyched about getting reviewed at all. I mean, look, I can't front, I'm a struggling Off-Off bottom-feeder. A bad review primarily upsets me at a pragmatic level at this point, in that it doesn't help me to attract people to our show. The only bad ones that really bother me are the dismissive, lazy ones, ones where the reviewer clearly didn't feel like engaging with the material. (I've had one or two that were so lazily written that they incorrectly described the plot.)

I mean, maybe someday if I'm lucky I'll be so spoiled that a pan in the Times will send me to my bed, but right now, if someone takes the time to analyze something I wrote at any level, I'm over the moon. That's why I was so flattered by this writeup in The Ovationist, a blog that is new to me.

The two speakers have very kind things to say about HAIL SATAN, but one of them also has some fairly centrally directed critiques, even going so far as to ask if the subject matter was best treated as a play or not. To be opening this line of inquiry demonstrates that the writer thought very carefully about the play before writing, and that to me is insanely flattering. I've had several of these types of thoughtful writeups over the summer on ROBOTS and SATAN from various bloggers and critics, some positive and some mixed, but they always make me feel like a million bucks.

--SlowLearner

THE DEVIL YOU KNOW

Hi everybody! Sorry I've been away this week; I've actually been so broke that my Typepad account was briefly suspended, but no longer!

Reviews are coming in for HAIL SATAN, and we're hopeful for some more this weekend and early next week.

OffOffOnline liked us (I particularly appreciated the final paragraph, and the shout-outs to Jordy and Sean's top-quality work).

David Cote had some very kind and incisive thoughts on his blog.

AmericanTheaterWeb wasn't as keen, and neither was NYTheatre, but the latter did praise the humor and the astonishing performance of Laura Perloe, which you really have to see.

The former review contains a reference to "minimal production values," an assessment with which I concur. Given our fifteen minutes of prep time before each performance, we went out of our way to ensure that our production values would be minimal. I hope and believe that you'll find that the story and character values will compensate.

To hear me talking about the show with interviewer Trav S.D., listen to this NYTheatre podcast (and actually, listen to all of it if you have time; it's really great stuff). I'm on second right after Rise Like A Penis, and I sound a lot more intelligent than I thought I did during the actual recording. I like to think that Rochelle Denton's postproduction wizardry made me sound smarter.

For full info, including our remaining four performance dates, check out our online press release.

In other Fringe matters, this weekend I'm seeing Riding The Bull at 12 noon tomorrow, and then on Sunday I'm seeing Dressing Miss Julie at 2 and Piaf: Love Conquers All at 4. In between, I'm catching Andrew Frank and Doug Silver's adaptation of Measure For Measure at manhattantheatresource. So if I owe you money, that's where I'll be!

--SlowLearner

MY DAUGHTER IS COMING TO PREPARE THE WAY

New post on the HAIL SATAN Blog.

--SlowLearner

THERE IS WOTHING NURSE THAN THE COPULAR PULTURE

Look, I know it's boring when we all link to the same posts, but just on the off chance that there's anyone who reads my blog but doesn't read some of the way-more popular ones, I wouldn't want them to miss Charlie Willis's peerless post today.

--SlowLearner

MATTHEWS

Is Matthew Freeman the Matthew Ygleisas of the theatrosphere? Like his political blogosphere namesake, he's often the one calling for a bit of calm and horse-whisperering the more excitable of us. In a terrific post, he has the temerity to suggest that theater isn't in a state of crisis and maybe a series of small, carefully selected fixes - as opposed to a revolution - are the true order of the day. I don't yet know enough to know if I agree with him or not, but I'm glad someone's making that case.

--SlowLearner

TAKE A LITTLE BAD WITH THE GOOD

I'm way too tired to wrap my head around it this morning, but here's a great post and a great comments section over at Paul Rekk's place. I really need to update my blogroll. There's a ton of awesome people out there.

On the subject of New York-centrism and why people should or should not live in NYC, I completely missed this nearly year-old-post from A Poor Player that beautifully lays out the argument. I've been here for ten years, and I can tell whoever's reading this, this isn't the place to come for fame and fortune. You've honestly got to come here because this is the kind of place you'd like to live, or if not, you should make theater under astronomically easier conditions somewhere you'd enjoy more. Just sort of think about what sort of world you want to have around you everyday.

However, I feel like Mr. Loughlin's most current post, taken along with some comments I've read a few places, are making an error in perception. Loughlin is concerned that the entire theater world is falling prey to entropy, and others have expressed the concern that bloggers that participate in online arguments are doing so at the expense of actually making plays. This, along with the curiously anonymous Throwdown Blog, seems to be part of a more widely held belief that arguing is bad.

I would say a couple of things:

1) Many of the participants in the stereotypes debate are simultaneously, hard at work on other pursuits when they're not blogging, and some of those pursuits involve making theater.

2) The stereotypes argument had some uniquely bad and aberrant features, and shouldn't discourage passionate debate in general. (See again that awesome Paul Rekk comments section up top.)

3) It's important not to judge the health of theater with the health of the theatrosphere on any given week. When I look at what's going on around me in terms of shows I'm seeeing and hearing about, I think I can reassure Mr. Loughlin without hesitation that we can keep entropy at bay for a little while yet.

--SlowLearner

UPDATE: Another amazing post on a closely related subject, brought to me by Mike Daisy, Adam, and Malachy. As a guy who is frequently unable to properly remunerate amazing and hardworking artists, this one hit hard. It's also a potent argument for decentralization.