Dude! Check out the all-star lineup!
Is there any way these could all be covered on blogs? I could definitely do one.
The pisser is I think I'm out of town for the Scott Walters (scottwaltersscottwalters) one.
Hat-tip to one of the participating all-stars, Isaac.
--SlowLearner
Click on the pic for more gorgeousness than you can handle! (Goldfarb, your looks are becoming a problem.)
Nosedive Productions Presents,
A new play by James Comtois
Directed by Pete Boisvert
Featuring
Zack Calhoon* — Abe Goldfarb* — Jessi Gotta
Marc Landers — Mac Rogers — Patrick Shearer
Ben VandenBoom — Christopher Yustin
The 78th Street Theatre Lab, 236 West 78th St., 2nd Floor
May 8-10, 15-17, 22-24, 29-31
Thursday through Saturday, 8 p.m.
Okay, so there's no way I'm going to be able to respond to all those comments today, but jeez, what a treasure-trove. Thank you all for stopping by and sharing. Over at Rat Sass, Alison Croggon comments, "Some American bloggers sure spend a lot of time talking about talking," but I can only plead in my defense that I learned to have these sorts of conversations from my blogging influences, among them Ms. Croggon herself, who spearheaded discussions about discussion that I treasure, such as this one.
At any rate, I hope you'll read through the comments, particularly the ones from people who are already trying versions of DV's idea. What I get from it all myself is that extreme care and discretion is required in writing about rehearsals, if you do so at all, and probably the best model is one in which the whole production is predicated at the outset on that kind of more extensive journaling, so everybody enters into it voluntarily and fully informed. Generally, though, actors aren't too keen on this sort of thing, and being one myself, I totally hear that. Still, short of blogging about the rehearsal process itself, maybe there are other aspects of the work that can shared as they develop. Devilvet's carrying this idea forward with his supercool graphic novel approach, which you should check out.
Hopefully this conversation will continue at several venues, and in the process sort of morph into the larger conversation that is suggests, one on how theater artists who live far apart can still share elements of their work. Right now, if James plugs Colorful World or Nick plugs Outside Inn, to New Yorkers it seems like an opportunity to see something new and possibly cool, but to readers in other locations who won't get to see it, it just seems like a plug instead of a blog entry, which would be more interesting to them. (Both writers, it should be noted, are using blogging in different ways to share cool stuff about their respective shows; I'm just using them as examples because they have ongoing or forthcoming shows.) So the question becomes, how do we exchange this most local of media in an international venue like the internet? That, with apologies to Alison, seems to me the value of the conversation.
Still, all those comments on my normally dormant blog (my fault, I know) make me giddy. Ordinarily to get that much interest, I have to fight Scott Walters! Although I did mention his name a few times in there. Maybe that's the trick. Maybe you have to say "Scott Walters" in your post somewhere, and people will flock to you.
Lemme try it out: Here's a plug for my next play!
*******************************************************************
MAC ROGERS: A LIFE LIVED WITH PASSION
by Mac Rogers
Directed by Mac Rogers
Featuring The Pussycat Dolls, the car from "Knight Rider," and Mac Rogers
Playing Thursdays through Saturdays throughout Maypril at the Winter Garden on Broadway Street
Tickets $10 with a $97 Mac Rogers handling fee
Scott Walters
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Now watch the money roll in...
--SlowLearner
On the enhanced promotion front, I'm very pleased to see the blog for the upcoming play formerly titled Atheist Viagara. Isaac's got some great stuff on there, but the key attraction is getting to read new pieces by the long-offline Dan Trujillo.
--SlowLearner
Mixed-to-positive review of Colorful World! I'm very funny!
--SlowLearner
The Devilvet puts forward a proposal: enhanced self-promotion. Rather than have bloggers stop promoting their shows on their blogs (which won't happen and shouldn't happen), make the promotion interesting. Talk about how you created your show and what it might have to offer.
DV suggests, and Scott Walters cautiously seconds, the idea that bloggers begin writing about their rehearsal processes as a means of sharing with others outside the production what we're making and how we're making it. I noted my concern, specifically that I felt the rehearsal environment is delicate. DV responded:
Mac, please endulge me...elaborate about the delicacies of the environment. Lets try to map the obstacles...then we can strategize possible tactics.
This dovetails a bit with the tone debate that raged toward the end of last week over at AWG (in which I was a participant).
I'll explain why, but let me say one thing first: I am in no way attempting to preemptively shoot down DV's idea by pointing out a problem with it. I'm pointing out a problem in the hopes that it will modify or clarify DV's initiative. I want it to work out.
I've been in theatrical rehearsals as a playwright, a director, and an actor, and sometimes two of the three, so I've experienced rehearsals from several angles. In general, as a performer, I'm a low maintenance guy. I'm a believer in re-running moments rather than talking about them too much. I prefer my directions to come in the form of: "Stand over there." "Don't get angry so fast." "Give her a little look to show that you're sorry, then exit." But if I'm in a scene with an actor who needs a lot of discussion or even special exercises to find a moment, I feel it's incumbent upon me to be patient and cooperate. It might be me some day who needs the extra help.
But whatever the method being practiced by the artists involved, it's a pretty across-the-board truth that everyone in a rehearsal room needs to feel that they can trust everyone around them. There's a kind of intimacy there. You want to find ways of expressing moments in the play unexpectedly, strikingly. You want to reach a little deeper both in yourself and in your relationships with the other actors so you can give the audience interactions and beats that are initially startling, and then profoundly recognizable.
And how do you do that?
Well, you have to get silly. You have to go too far. You have to try some wrong choices. You have to be vulnerable and ridiculous. You have to do that first, and then you refine.
Which means that you need to believe that you're in the room with people you can trust. People that won't laugh at you or shit-talk you or undermine you. If there's even one person in that room who gives you that feeling, you're gonna shut down and make safe playing (or directing) choices in order to protect yourself, and your play will be that much duller as a result.
So, the rehearsal room needs to feel like a safe place.
(An interesting side note: one thing that originally drew me to theater was that I was a weird kid who didn't fit in and got laughed at and mocked a lot, and then I discovered this place where people weren't allowed to laugh at you. That's no longer the chief attraction, and I've discovered since that the theatrical world harbors its fair share of bullies, but it's nice that there's at least an over-arching ethic that sneers and abuse are unwelcome in rehearsal rooms.)
Along similar lines, Scott Walters wrote this on his (currently suspended) Theatre Ideas blog last June:
I will continue to write this blog, and I hope that readers who are interested in new models of how theatre might be done in the communities outside of NYC will continue to read. But I will no longer be addressing the NYC theatre scene, nor will I be responding to defenses of the NYC scene, nor attacks emanating from the NYC scene. If such posts appear in my comments box, I will ignore them or delete them. I will no longer define my ideas in terms of the dominant mode of production. I plan to be more utopian.If there are "warm, supportive" people who have been reading, but who have been reluctant to comment for fear of abuse -- this blog is now a safe zone. So I hope you will let your voice be heard.
I don't quote this to reopen old wounds, but to draw attention to Scott's use of the term "safe zone" and to draw an equivalence between an online safe zone and a rehearsal room safe zone. In the rehearsal room, directors are often trying to gently help actors through difficult transitions or to make specific calibrations in their work. Often both parties feel weird and exposed during this process. They have to trust each other. Opening this artistic, professional, and personal transaction to the internet means bringing in a whole bunch of new people to this delicate process, people you're not sure if you can trust. People with a history that's not entirely bereft of instances of abuse and ridicule. I can't help but wonder: if I open my rehearsal process up to those people, what are they going to say? And will their online voices be ringing in my ears and the ears of my colleagues each time we meet again to work?
In short, it is my belief that a rehearsal process requires an environment that is quite unlike the one that predominates in the theatrosphere on a periodic basis. I would very much like, like DV, a more substantive discussion of our artistic approaches and struggles online, particularly between those of us who live too far apart to be likely to experience one another's techniques and approaches firsthand, in collaboration. But if I had to choose between keeping my rehearsals safe and risking that safety for the sake of promoting that discussion, I'll choose the former in one-fourth of a heartbeat. The trick, I think, is going to be in making that choice unnecessary.
*****
Let me say a little bit more on "tone." I know perfectly well that every time I bring it up, some folks are going to react as if I'm trying to control their speech, or that I want to squelch truth-telling in the name of empty politeness. I simply don't agree that there's a stark choice between an honest-and-abusive conversation and a civil-and-dishonest conversation. I wish people wouldn't frame the debate in those terms.
But look, whenever I bring this up, I already know something before I do so: I've lost. It won't happen. I get it. The people who want to write in a certain way will keep writing that way. What can I do about it? I can't control anybody else's behavior. But I return again to Scott's "safe zone" idea. Some people, myself included, will shy away if the order of the day is intense, aggressive discussion. They will go looking for a place where they can speak without fear of that sort of thing. The temptation will always exist to call people like me "thin-skinned."
But let me submit something for general consideration: it's not all bad to be thin-skinned. It's not much good in a comment-thread flame-war, but maybe it helps a bit in other ways. Thin-skinned people have to learn a delicate, careful approach to life that can bring out the best in certain other people. They have quicker access to certain vulnerabilities that can be valuable in an artistic or rehearsal process. They can notice small but important thing about other people that the thicker-skinned people miss. I would suggest that the thicker-skinned people might conclude, if they were to study us thin-skinned folks more carefully, that we have a place in this arena and this conversation, and that they might be losing something by chasing us away.
Or maybe not. Each person can decide for themselves.
Anyway. Back to you, DV.
--SlowLearner
I haven't written about this play yet, but I found Matt Freeman's When Is A Clock to be simultaneously lovely and panic-inducing.
Lovely because it's written with such clinical compassion and such unshowy linguistic precision, panic-inducing because it's about a man I'd really like to never become. It's about a man succumbing to that unique feeling of purposelessness that can creep into adult American lives - a man who doesn't know why he lives where he lives, why he works where he works, or why he lives with and loves the people in his house. When he starts to lose the things in his life, this spiritual dislocation robs him of the tools he needs to properly fight for them. This is a very hard subject to write about, as it doesn't lend itself to fiery dramatic confrontations but instead to quiet moments of observation. Freeman resisted the impulse to jack up the conflict in some way (which is what I would have done), and as a result has come up with a somewhat austere play that is hard to like right away, but which haunts you increasingly in the days after you see it.
There's a lot of other stuff there - magic spells and mysteries and quite a bit of comedy - but the Man I Don't Want To Be part is what got me in the gut.
Anyway, it's worth seeing this weekend after you've seen Colorful World six times. Now, I could be a career-hungry New York blogger plugging my smug little clique in order to better position my networking or whatever, or I may actually mean it. There's no way for you to know for sure!
--SlowLearner
What's that? You missed The Blueprint Project but you still want your Mac fix? Or you did see TBP but you want MORE?
Either way, you're in luck, as I will be treading the boards in Nosedive's production of James Comtois's superhero epic COLORFUL WORLD, opening this Thursday!
I'll write about this a little more tomorrow, hopefully soundling like less of an asshole, but I wanted to go ahead and drop the graphics on you, to mention how please I am to once again be smoking the Nosedive doob, and to let you know that you're gonna have an awesome time at this show.
Details here.
--SlowLearner
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