Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
I babysat tonight, for the first time in about 12 years. It was... an
experiance. But I would imagine it was moreso for the parents, as this
was their first night out in several months, and only their second
night out without their (2yr old) daughter in almost two years.

On my way home, I decided it was too early to be in bed, and detoured
to a local club... fun! First time I've been there on my own...
intimidating, too.  :-)

DanW - I like your picture; especially how the angels wings are
overlapped, just slightly...

-Kelly, who's wondering how to get the smoke out of the plastic she
had woven into her hair last night...
  

    

Martha, I thought the HBO versio of Mikal's "Shot in the Heart" was pretty
good.
  

    
Linda, yes the wall got fixed (thank goodness), although last night
had it's own share of amusements. Between the blackout shutter (which
we didn't have when you came) going on the fritz, the sanity impaired
woman who walked onto the set and started going through Peter Painter's
phone book before the show, to an audience member who felt it was
appropriate to call out comments during the pieces... it was quite the
interesting evening.

Martha - thank you! I'm so glad you made it.

Linda - Sadly, after starting late, having a long intermission, and
the fact that the show is 2 1/2 hours long and San Francisco is going
through a very warm spell right now.. people crapped out for the Q&A
session, so Martha had to deal with the cast and crew peppering her
with questions.

Kelly - Thank you!
  

    
The crazy woman in the audience:

Almost everyone was seated.  Full house: the crew was bringing in extra
chairs to put in front of the banked seats.  A perfectly normal-looking
maybe 30-something Asian woman walks in, goes straight to the stage--which
is floor level and you sort of cross the corner of while going to the
seats--sits down on the bed on the set, pulls the phone book from the night
table next to the bed, and starts flipping through it.

She was so casual, yet deliberate--no hesitation--that the audience clearly
assumed this was how the show started.  After a couple of moments someone
from the show dashed up and told her that was the set and showed her to a
seat.

That made the audience look around at each other nervously.  A man sitting
near her made some remark about if it had been his apartment and someone had
just gone and sat on his bed and started going through his phone book--  The
woman said, "Oh, is this your apartment?" and I think wanted to know what
kind of rent he paid!  The stage was laid with a minimum theatrical setting:
bed and nightstand on one side, table and two chairs on the other side, with
a huge white curtain, the video screen, along the back, and black curtains
marking off the sides.

Oh, and the _banked rows of seats_ facing that stage....

Finally, a little late, but not too late considering the time it took to
bring in the extra seating for the extra-large audience, the show started.
The lights went down.

"Could somebody turn on the lights?" came the voice from the front row.

Lights came on, performance started with a narrator (the salesman from
Neil's story) declaiming, and a sentence or two into that she said, "Oh--
it's a show."  Much eye contact made from one audience member to another.  A
minute or two later, as the show progressed, she just got up and left, and
everyone breathed easier, and everything else went without a hitch.

Back later.
  

    
    Audience participation theatre.  You can't beat it, because that's
assault and battery.
    The play SINGER contains a performance by a Sixties avant-garde
theatre troupe. As it was warming up, Antony Sher sat (in character) on
the edge of the stage, bought some malted milk balls and shared them
with the front rows.  It made some people surprisingly nervous.
    And for some reason now I'm imagining a dinner-theatre production
of TITUS ANDRONICUS.  "It's all right -- the younger kid was
vegetarian."
  

    
For no reason now I'm concerned Mike might try to stage that show.

Later on a couple of different crew people told me the lady was from the
soup kitchen program held elsewhere in the church, and also that she has a
boyfriend from Venus, or that's what she said, anyway.  She didn't look at
the prop book stagewalker used for my piece, "Men Are From Mars, Women Are
From Venus", or she would have realized her boyfriend was lying to her.  (It
came to me later, by the way, that that prop book should have been a
baseball book, probably one of the Bill James compendiums.  But I digress
from a digression.)

So, the Hearts in Shadow show.  It's four short plays, running two and a
half hours (with intermission), with an ensemble cast of four women and
three men.  All use multimedia effects, all take a rather literary approach
with a fair amount of narration--in three of the plays, narration by the
characters themselves.  (So I was surprised to find one of them, Don Nigro's
"Scarecrow", was actually written as a stage play, because it contained a
similar degree of literary narration to stage action.)

The first thing I noticed was that none of the three directors took writing
credits in the program, though, as a writer, I thought they should.  I
suppose that wasn't the first thing anyone but me noticed.  (Even
"Scarecrow" was abridged, I was told, by the director.  And the Chekov piece
was mostly based on one Chekov story but wove in a folk tale and other
elements--definitely a writing job, I'd say!)

I'm thinking this could be a long post if I discuss all four short plays in
it, so on to the next rock.
  

    
Actually, can I even go to the next rock?  Isn't this topic full?
  

    

I think it is.