Forwards and Backwards

So, I am near completion of the script for Banned in Boston.

We had a reading of it the other night, and all seemed pleased, which is a relief! 

It is quite difficult, writing a script for non-actors, who will not have rehearsed and will probably be a bit looped as well.  Script in hand, mic in the other.  No props.  No more than 3 lines per person at a time, or thereabouts (any more, and they start to get lost). 

And it needs to be funny. 

The host, it turns out, will be super-handsome TV actor David Walton, Boston native and star of the new NBC show "Bent".   It will be exciting to meet him.  I can finally ask the burning question of what it's like to be an actor that actually gets paid something.  Last time I acted, I think I was actually paid in gummy worms.

Banned in Boston will go up on April 27th, for one night only.  School will end the following week, and I'll have some time off for a bit. 

I usually don't do much in the summer.  I haven't been able to find any regular summer work, besides my one-week stint at BoCo's Vocal Choral Intensive for High School students, which is always a crazy blur of fun.  So I usually need to be frugal in the summer.

The Groom, The Maid, The Bellhop & The Bride

This summer, however, The Hotel Nepenthe will arise from the ashes for 6 six shows, as part of the TCG Conference in June.  Same cast, director and designers, which is awesome!  ASP is co-pro-ing with the Huntington, and we'll perform at the Wimberly (with the audience onstage with us!).

Paula in "Miss Price"

After that, I will be working on a play I wrote over 10 years ago for Paula Plum to perform.  It's a solo show called Miss Price, which I will re-write for a reading at Gloucester Stage at the end of July.  Miss Price is about a lonely librarian who strikes an unlikely friendship with the title character: the unseen mysterious Miss Price, her replacement.  Very excited to revisit a play that I wrote so long ago.  My good friend Doug Lockwood is directing and Paula will reprise her role!

Cat Paternostro as The Siren in Necessary Monsters

Working on the rewrite of Necessary Monsters, as well.

Myself and Marissa Rae Roberts in "Uncle Vanya"

In the Fall, Apollinaire wants to remount Uncle Vanya, so I feel very lucky that I will get a chance to play Vanya again! I must admit, I sort of like having a beard.  I feel very professorial.  And young people give up their seat on the bus for me. 

the salt girl

After the Vanya remount, I have an interesting project in November: the Massachusetts Institute of Psychoanalysts is holding a national symposium in Boston and they would like me to perform The Salt Girl  as part of their event, for one show only, at NINE in the morning (are people even awake then?) in the conference room of the new Fenway Health Building on Beacon Street with a panel discussion to follow.  I've met with them a few times to talk about it, and they are all quite nice.  A few of them had seen the play when I performed it at BPT a few years ago. 

Obviously, it would need to be more of a staged reading: it's impossible to remount the entire production for one show.  But the group is terribly supportive and really gung-ho.  They really love the play!  I had no idea that so many psychoanalysts would be so into The Salt Girl.  It really means a lot to me.  And makes me feel even crazier then I already do.  In a good way.

Quint

I'm really looking forward to re-visiting The Salt Girl, actually.  I had always hoped that it might have another life somewhere.  It's a fictional piece about a man named Quint who postpones his suicide to visit his estranged father on his death bed.  My own father died in a car accident in 2001.  It was a terrible time, and the play helped me find a perspective about what had happened.  But really that's the only true event in the play.  And even that feels like fiction.  Because memory is so fluid and warped (which, I guess, is what the play is about, among other things).  I was thinking about it recently, what with all the controversy surrounding Mike Daisey, and what is true or not when it's presented onstage.  For me, I always present everything as false.  Even the true stuff.  So no one is hurt.  In theory. 

I would like to make The Salt Girl a one-act, if possible.  The main response I've found with the piece (and I agree) is that it feels too long.  I always felt that it wants to be a one act, no intermission.  But we couldn't figure out how to make that happen at BPT.  And two hours seemed too long for an audience to sit thru (then again, I just saw The Andersen Project, and that was no problem.  I could have seen the whole thing again!).  So we had an intermission.  But an intermission disrupts the flow of the piece, and it's such a strange world, with it's own set of rules, that when you stop for a break, it's hard to get back into it.  I think.  So, I'm going to give it a try with this reading.  And hopefully it will find another home, somewhere, like Nepenthe.

So, everything is redux, redux, redux.

Nicky Sawyer as Irma & Joe Longthorne as The Chief of Police

School will start up as well in the Fall, of course.  I'm not directing anything this year.  But looking back, I could not be more proud of The Balcony.  It's an incredibly difficult text, and I thought the students did a remarkable job.  And the production was beautiful.  BoCo could not have been more supportive.  That I was lucky enough to work with all those incredible designers and technicians, well, really, amazing!  When I think that I directed it, it seems impossible.  It's like a trial by fire.  You feel like you can climb a mountain after that.  I would like to start directing more.  I really do like it.  And it's a creative challenge (and quite fun) to explore how you envision a world like the world in The Balcony.  I always saw a blown-up run way, and heard pop music.  It has photographers and crazy costumes, after all.  I thought it would be like Project Runway during a coup.  On acid. 

I tried reading the 900-page Genet by Edmund White but gave up about a third of the way thru and just skipped to the juicy parts concerning The Balcony.  That and the other research made me feel a little better about what I wanted to do, because I realized that no matter what I did, Genet would probably have hated it.  He hated every production of The Balcony.  He didn't even like the play itself after awhile, apparently: he felt it was a rehearsal for The Screens and The Blacks (which he considered much better plays). 

If you are contemplating directing The Balcony, here's some things I discovered, which you might find helpful (or not):

 1.  It is LONG!  It is almost ALWAYS cut.  (The last time the play was done professionally in Boston was at the ART, directed by Joanne Akalitis.  Akalitis's production was over 4 hours long!  She didn't cut a thing.  Tommy played one of the photographers, and since the photographers didn't appear until the last scene, his call time was 10pm - .  His CALL time was 10pm!  Now that's a long play!) 

So, you need to cut it, just like Winter's Tale! 

Personally I think plays should either be 90 minutes or 8 hours long. 

But WHAT you cut is another story.  The New York production that Jose Quintero directed cut all of Scene 6, which is the scene between Chantal and Roger, the revolutionary.  I didn't want to do that for a few reasons: first, it would have eliminated the role of Chantal completely, and limited the role of Roger drastically (and since it is a student production, I wanted as many people involved as possible, of course).  I also really felt that they were the heroes of the play.  It's Roger and Chantal that you are rooting for, in the end.  At least, for me.  Everyone else is sort of an asshole.  Except of course, maybe for Irma and Carmen.  But that's debatable.  I ended up keeping Scene 6, and I made the most cuts in Scenes 5, 7 and 9 (in the long tete a tete between Irma and Carmen, the Envoy scene and the long scene between the Chief of Police and the Three Functionaries, respectively).  Even cut, the play is long , that's just what it is  (our version was 3 hours, which is Shakespeare length).  But I also added a pre-show that dramatized Chantals' escape from the brothel with Roger (which is spoken about, but never seen).  Otherwise, you have NO idea who these people are.  Especially if you cut the passing mention of them in Scene 5.  Which I did.

bulletproof!

2.  There are many versions of The Balcony.  Genet re-wrote this play over ELEVEN times.  He was never quite satisfied with it, apparently.  All these different re-writes are floating about.  I found three.  His life-long friend and translator, Bernard Frechman, did every version that I found, so there was no discrepancy in that regard.   But there are drastic differences in all of them.  Scene 6, for example, is very different in the earlier version (the "revised" version is the most common).  Chantal is accompanied by not just Roger, but a whole slew of revolutionaries, and the scene resembles - for me -  one of those scenes from an old French war film.  It's pretty inscrutable.  Another version (which I found, unbelievably, as part of the liner notes for a 6-album British recording of The Balcony in 1966- with Patrick Magee as The Bishop) has an ENTIRE additional scene between Carmen, The Bishop and Rosine, (the Bishop's "girl" or penitent) at the end of Scene 7 (rather than ending on The Envoy's line "I don't have time for your crap", Carmen and The Bishop enter, and he is dressed by Rosine for his role as the "real" Bishop onstage).  It is a FABULOUS scene NOWHERE to be found in any of the other versions, so I was really excited that I stumbled upon it!  Not sure why he would cut it.  Then again, Edward Albee cut the entire end of Act 2 scene between George and Honey in his 2004 re-write of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, which was like a knife in my heart.  I mean, WHAT?!  That scene is AWESOME!  But, oh well!  He's the playwright, after all! 

Another great thing about this lost Bishop/Rosine scene: it helps buy time for Irma to change into the Queen for her entrance in Scene 8.  Without it, she pretty much leaves at the end of Scene 7 and comes right back on stage as The Queen at the top of Scene 8, which is a quick change indeed!  Our transformation was pretty elaborate, so we needed that extra time.  There's also another version (in French only, I believe) that includes a "dream ballet" of blood, tears and sperm (played by the actors playing the Photographers).  I couldn't find this version, sadly.  But I found where it used to be, and just added my own ballet. 

To Leslie Gore's "Sunshine, Lollipops". 


Why not?

Ode to Cleopatra

Airy elation! Imbibe time!

We’re all getting blotto, boys!

Pulsating watusi toes twinkling

Now Now Now

Roll out that grapey chaise lounge

Pit that olive!

Bake that brie!

Get Juno on the horn, man!

Remember when we couldn’t have any fun?


Quaffing Caecuban was a seven deadly
While psycho Queenie was scheming and dreaming:


“Death to the Empire!”

“Destroy the Capitol!”


With her infected horde of teste-challenged go-go boys

A spoiled orgy of prissy Persian cats

Her manic, pea-green expectations

webby with absinthe…


Her fleet smolders in like a strip club gaze

A tangled Luisitania jig

Cold shower face slap

She awakens from her smoky stupor

Telescoping Caesar, salad days spinning

as he chips at her ass

A hungry hawk


A serial killer smile in a frozen boxwood maze


Hoping to haul the femme fatale back to Rome

Tattooed

Pierced

Spread-eagled on a carny’s knee


But she dreams of a more noble sleep.


And as she gazed on her burning empire

She grasped the basket of asps

Serene, Calm

She cradles them near, seeking their silky venom

The mirage of death flits, squid-like through her veins


She plunges downward now

Escaping his reach

Proud

Arrogant

Her final defeat

Descends into triumph



Note: I wrote this a while ago: it's my stab at translating an Horace ode.  I re-discovered it while thinking of Antony & Cleopatra, of course, which closes this weekend and ends ASP's season.  If you haven't seen the show yet, you should really try to get in, it's pretty amazing, and Paula is astounding and heart-breaking as always! 

Here's
the info:


The Modern Theatre at Suffolk University
525 Washington Street
Downtown Crossing
directed by Adrianne Krstansky
TONIGHT at 7:30pm
Thursday 5.19 & Friday 5.20 at 7:30pm
CLOSING: Saturday 5.21 at 3:00pm and 8:00pm
Purchase your tickets today with the code FINAL10 and receive $10 off the price of your ticket!
Featuring: James Andreassi*, Siobhan Brown, Jesse Hinson,
Doug Lockwood*, Johnnie McQuarley, Paula Plum*, Mara Sidmore*, Richard Snee* and Giselle Ty.
Buy your tickets HERE!
or call 866-811-4111

Miss Price and Me

My good friend Paula just send me this great pic of us from 10 years ago, on the set of "Miss Price", a solo show I wrote for her to perform.

She was magnificent, of course!

Much Ado Two

Much Ado has been getting better and better, the audiences have been great!
The reviews have also, for the most part, been very kind.
I'm in this strange new place concerning reviews lately.

I try not to read them, and I didn't for quite awhile. But then I discovered that I didn't like not knowing what was being said: my imagination was always much worse than the actual review. Uncertainty is a terrible, gnawing thing.

So now I read them and try to forget them as best I can. I think the trick is to read them very quickly, ONCE, and then never look or think about it again. So I'm trying that for a while.

Reviews can be incredibly powerful, especially to a small theatre company: they can really help get the word out and fill seats. More people will read our Globe review of "Much Ado" than actually see the show.

There was a bit of a flurry recently over the review of "Pirates!" at the Huntington. Louise Kennedy's review was pretty negative. So the managing director, Michael Maso, got on the Huntington blog and told everyone to write into the Globe and complain about it. And a lot of people did. I've never seen such a thing. It was pretty entertaining.

I had a "flame war" recently with a reviewer for "The Super Heroine Monologues", who didn't like our writing at all (Rick Park and me, that is!). The review itself was sloppy, misspelled, poorly written and ANONYMOUS and this guy had the nerve to be critiquing MY writing? That's sort of where I draw the line: you have to put your name on what you write and stand behind it, I think. And pressing "spell check" doesn't hurt, either.

Then, today, I saw this review online at http://www.playshakespeare.com/ by this guy named Lance Norris, who totally ripped us all to shreds. The funny thing is: I know Lance Norris: he's this guy from my home town of Cohasset, where he was kind of a zaftig local character. He also played a small part in a film I was in many years ago called "Anathema", so I knew him as a film actor. But I guess he's a critic now. Of sorts.
It's just weird when someone you know from a totally different part of your life suddenly appears out of no where as a critic and pans you.
His review basically tells people that if you come to our show, you will probably be murdered, if not by our bad acting, then by the drug dealers outside with guns who are stealing your car. He goes on and on about how unsafe the neighborhood is where we are performing.

Uh, thanks Lance.

Just to be clear: one of our missions at Actors Shakespeare Project is to bring our plays to neighborhoods and communities that don't usually get to experience live professional theatre. Or Shakespeare. It's a worthy enterprise. And Dudley Square isn't exactly the war zone that Norris makes it out to be. And Hiberian Hall is a lovely space, very close to Mass Ave, and not too far a drive from the BCA and its nice row of restaurants. But it IS a little rough around the edges, so perhaps a little extra caution wouldn't hurt when locking your car/walking to the theatre. So hopefully people will come and make up there own minds. The audience seems to be enjoying the story. And there's something quite lovely about watching Paula and Richard fall in love.

Only three more weeks left! Hope you can make it! Here's the info below:


Much Ado About Nothing
By William ShakespeareDirected by Benjamin EvettMay 14 – June 14Roxbury Center for Arts at Hibernian Hall
182 -186 Dudley Street, Roxbury
(Easy to get to, located just off I-93, one block from Dudley T stop, lots of parking within walking distance of the venue)
SALE - $10 OFF Memorial Day Weekend Performances!
USE CODE: MEMDAY
Directions to Hibernian Hall
MORE INFORMATION
BUY TICKETS ONLINE
or call 866-811-4111

THE REVIEWS - "'Much Ado' is much more than a love story"

The Boston Globe“Love, both in the first bright spark of attraction and in the slowly building glow of old flames, provides both heat and light for [ASPs] fine, fizzy production… we have the pure delight of watching Paula Plum and Richard Snee create an intricate, intelligent, and intoxicating dance between these two prickly lovers.” –Louise KennedyFULL REVIEW
The Boston Phoenix“…the swank-on-a-shoestring ASP affair, managing to wed Noël Coward–esque sparring to the slapstick…[Plum] conveys almost from the beginning the vulnerability of prickly, brainy Beatrice. And Snee manages to seem both debonair and silly — often at once.” –Carolyn ClayFULL REVIEW
EDGE Boston
“The cast do a heart-stopping job… Snee and Plum sizzle, serving volleys of wit and electricity at one another… this is "Much Ado" done right.” –Killian MelloyFULL REVIEW
The Patriot Ledger
“To watch a show presented by Actors’ Shakespeare Project is to marvel at the agility of a small band of actors covering all the roles. Director Ben Evett has chosen this company from the “A list” of Boston’s theatrical community.” –Iris FangerFULL REVIEW
The Boston Herald“…this is a production of small flourishes and light joys. Evett’s production functions on a shoestring, and uses it to hilarious metatheatrical effect… it’s a lot of fun. And on a warm summer evening, what more do you need?” –Jenna SchererFULL REVIEW
BUY TICKETS ONLINE
or call 866-811-4111
ALSO...
2009/2010 Subscriptions Now Available
Early Bird Pricing!
$10 Off All Packages!
Download Subscription FormOr call Joanna at 617-776-2200 ext. 225
Actors' Shakespeare Project
Arts At The Armory, 191 Highland Avenue, Somerville MA, 02143.
(617) 776-2200
http://actorsshakes.pmailus.com/pmailweb/ct?d=IJT24gAxAAEAAAILAALfDw
2009 Best Theater Company - The Boston Phoenix, "...one of the most relevant and provocative companies in the Greater Boston area."

Much Ado

We are deep into rehearsals for "Much Ado About Nothing" with the Actors Shakespeare Project, a company I helped to found with a group of other Boston actors.
I have never been in the play before, tho I've seen it quite a number of times. Being in it is a very different experience: it's an impossibly lighthearted play. I don't mean that in a frivolous way, but in a rather profound way: it captures this innate sense of fun and joy and mischief that humans just contain in there core, somewhere. Even the dark aspects seem light (hence, I suppose, the title!)

We are doing the play in Roxbury, on the corner of Harrison and Dudley, at a space called Hiberian Hall, which is a renovated arts center building from the 50s (perhaps earlier). The space has been quite a challenge: the room tends to suck up your voice something AWFUL. The neighborhood is also a little off the beaten track and a bit rough around the edges, so there is concern about getting people to come in to see the show.

We are doing the play in the round, which has been quite a challenge.

Paula Plum and Richard Snee are playing Beatrice and Benedick. I'm playing Don Pedro, the Prince. I thought I would just have a couple of lines, but the guy actually never shuts up. Who knew?
Most of us are double cast, so we morph into different characters: Doug Lockwood plays Don John and Dogberry, which I think is a really interesting combination.

We open next week. I'll try to keep you posted on how it goes. Truthfully, I forgot that I had this blog until recently, when I was writing on another blog, and i "signed in", and up popped this "indentity". Kind of cool.
Johnny