Just Wrought

The Blessings of Getting Better: Sandbox Radio Live!

 

Like any good theatre town, Seattle tends to lavish plenty of hype on the inaugural production of a new company when that company is made up of talented veterans who have proven themselves on other stages around town. Pressure mounts on the new ensemble to make their kick-off show one of the best audiences have ever seen, thus assuring crucial momentum for the future. Of course, the inherent danger lies in forgetting that no matter how earth-shatteringly brilliant your first play is, the primary law of show business remains as immutable as gravity: you are only as good as your last gig.  A company that can never live up to the promise of its premiere production is a company destined to be loved like a first crush: fondly, but weakly, and with an ardor that fades even as the intervening years serve to burnish or blur the memory of love-at-first-sight’s luster.

Happily, through luck, hard work and great leadership, the Sandbox Artists Collective has managed to escape that fate with its quarterly audio offering, Sandbox Radio Live. Don’t get me wrong. We had a great initial outing, back in July of last year with our first show.  And lots of delicious hype to go with it. But I don’t know anyone who would argue we couldn’t do better.  And better we did, with the second iteration, a horror-themed show turned out just in time for Halloween.

With this third episode, however, every member of the team— writers, actors, musicians and production crew — stretched out into strong new strides: going beyond what we had done before with a confidence that surely grew out of our prior successes and failures.  Everyone seems to agree that Episode Three, “To Hell With Love” was our best show yet.  And best of all, now that the podcast is ready, you can listen and decide for yourself by clicking here.

For me, the evening did not contain a single clunker.  I loved every segment, from Anita Montgomery’s hilarious plumbing of the particular hell that is on-line dating in “F- You, Cupid!” to Elizabeth Heffron and Leslie Law’s stirring tribute to the great radio drama talent, Norman Corwin, in the show’s finale, “Corwin on Corwin.”  And I will never forget when Elizabeth Heffron’s delightful sex romp in space “T-Minus” gloriously dissolved into an Offenbach duet sung by Law and the shimmering soprano Heather Curtis Mullin.  As Heather herself will tell, you it’s no great accomplishment that this brought me to tears.  I’ll cry at a cell phone commercial.  But that doesn’t diminish the welling of awe I felt witnessing that unrecoverable moment of live theatre.

Wait!  What did I just say?  “Unrecoverable?”  Bullcrap!  Due to the greater glory of Sandbox Radio you can go and recover it right now, here!   (Act I, 52:50).

And here’s a list of all the evening’s pieces:

Episode 3, “To Hell With Love”
recorded at West of Lenin on January 23, 2012

Act 1

 

@1:55 "F-You, Cupid!" by Anita Montgomery
@13:28 PSA-Coal Free Washington by Vincent Delaney
@16:45 "Lost Love Blues" by Charles Leggett
@22:53 "Markheim: Episode 3" by Paul Mullin
@37:30 "T-Minus" by Elizabeth Heffron

Act 2

@0:00 “Angry” by Charles Leggett
@2:48 "Charlotte Doesn't Clean Here Anymore" by Scot Augustson
@17:55 PSA-Communities in Schools of Seattle by Vincent Delaney
@21:08 "Corwin by Corwin" by Elizabeth Heffron
@40:03 Finale/Credits

 

True to the night’s pattern, my own piece, the third installment of the noir angel series, Markheim, was the best one yet.  If I can modestly say so, I am really starting to find the action of the story.  And the actors, foley artists and musicians have modulated the series’ unique and tricky tone to pitch perfection.  As always, I’m providing the script for Episode Three below the fold.

 

 

 

Sincerely, Good Luck

Of course I believe in free will.  I have no choice.
Isaac Bashevis Singer

 

Imagine that I am essentially cynical and selfish. Imagine that what a friend of mine who works at one of Seattle Big Houses once told me is true: that the only reason I write this blog is because I’m mad that they won’t produce my plays.  Imagine that my outrage has always been, and will always be, essentially self-serving.  Come on.  Imagine.  Like the man says, it’s easy if you try.

It would explain a lot actually, like why nearly a year ago I felt safe saying in a post titled “On Institutional Arrogance”:

Allow me to honor the clarity of Intiman’s ultimatum with some clarity of my own: I hope they die.   I hope they do it soon and with a minimum of suffering.  And most of all I hope they do it without siphoning precious funds from the rest of us who make theatre in the Pacific Northwest.

It didn’t take a psychic to know that , despite then Artistic Director, Kate Whoriskey’s guilt-trippy pandering plea, they were highly unlikely to raise the half a million dollars they were asking for in what I called their “shoot-the-puppy” campaign.  So I bet the safe money and called for them to close their doors.  Cynical.  Self-serving.  And ultimately dead accurate.

Similarly but conversely, when the Intiman announced last August that they would keeping Andrew Russell on as “consulting artistic director” and that his goal for 2012 would be “….to establish a loose collective of playwrights, directors, actors, designers and others to devise projects for Intiman to produce, in a short "micro-season" mounted next summer…” I kept my mouth shut.  Here was a situation not so easy for a self-serving cynic to prognosticate. 

Then in November Russell made his plans plainer.  This from The Stranger’s Slog:

At a press conference earlier today, Intiman announced it was going to make a go of it after all, with a four-play summer festival, a repertory company of 12 actors, and artistic direction from Andrew Russell. The four-play season is a "split focus," as Russell put it, between Intiman regulars and a potential new crowd that wants to see newer, weirder, more local work.

Reading further down I learned that Russell had recruited for his bold new strategy some of Seattle’s most exciting (and mostly young) talents like Marya Sea Kaminski, Michael Place, and Jennifer Zeyl; topping it off by somehow snagging the venerable Dan Savage to provide the original work for Russell’s four play plan.  This was no longer a “shoot-the-puppy” campaign.  This was a “Honey-look-at–this-adorable-puppy-I-brought–home-for-Christmas!” campaign.  And a very sexy puppy at that.  When you’ve been as cynical and self-serving as I have, for as long as I have, you learn not to bet against this kind of talent.  I kept my mouth shut again and waited to see if the “phoenix Intiman” could raise the million they were now asking for.  I suspected they would.

And late last night we found out they did.

I have met Andrew Russell.  He was gracious enough to come hear an early reading of my new play Ballard House Duet.  Along with a handful of other trusted colleagues, he gave some truly insightful feedback.  It’s clear to me that Andrew is extraordinarily talented at motivating people and, more importantly, money.  In the world of 21st Century regional theatre, you really cannot ask for more of an artistic director.  And Andrew has a few other things going for him.  He’s young.  He’s ambitious, and unlike his predecessor Kate Whoriskey, he owes his position not to sinecure but his own pluck and determination.  In short, he earned it.  What’s more, he’s making deep connections with the amazing talent native to Seattle.  All this bodes well for the success of his career, if not necessarily for the sustained success of Intiman.  But then again, I think I have been clear in the past how much I care whether the institution we formerly knew as the Intiman lives or dies.  Instead I say, long live the talent represented in the team Andrew has assembled, and long live his own talent for recognizing and organizing it.

And if, as I cynically suspect, Andrew ultimately winds up on the same path as a few promising rookie Mariners, eventually proving himself worthy of a trade to the Yankees in a few years, well then, I may grumble and bitch, but I will still watch in quiet admiration when he belts one over the bleachers in New York.

 

Long Live Living Newspapers!

 

When The Stranger asked me at the end of the year what my biggest regret of 2011 was, I said:

I regret that due to limited resources, we had to mothball NewsWrights United prior to the Occupy movement blowing up, because I would have really liked to cover that in a living newspaper. Adjacent to that is my regret that none of the big houses in Seattle (or small, for that matter) saw fit to include making topical theatre, based on events happening right here right now, as part of their regular programming this year. 

Well, shade my regret mitigated by the news from across the pond that my former playwriting student German Munoz has organized a living newspaper about the Occupy movement called The Occupied Times.  After spending a month researching and visiting the Occupy sites in London, emerging playwrights will present a night of short plays in the format of a living newspaper. They will act as reporters and cast a critical eye on the Occupy movement, its supporters and detractors, all under the Arcola Tent. 

And color me even more vividly gratified when I saw that the project gave Seattle a shout-out in their press release:  “This project was inspired by It’s not in the P-I: A living Newspaper about a Dying Newspaper presented in Seattle in 2009 as a response to the closing of The Seattle Post-Intelligencer newspaper by Newswrights United.”

Not surprisingly, The Occupied Times seems to be garnering the same sort of media excitement that the two living newspapers NewsWrights United produced in 2009 and 2011.  The London Evening Standard ran a preview of the piece   and quoted my friend German thusly:

We want the show to explore sides of the movement that have not been heard. We're hoping to reach people of all ages who feel they've made up their minds about the Occupy movement. People who either think of the protesters as a bunch of lazy hippies who don't want to get a job, or see them as martyrs fighting the good fight against a system that is unbearably corrupt. Of course neither of these are completely true, and we want to show audiences our responses as artists and help them make up their own minds.

I heartily encourage my friends in London to check out this fresh, locally grown theatre inspired in the crucible of the right here and the right now.  Here’s the show info:

Six Degrees Productions presents  . . .

The Occupied Times: A living newspaper
about the Occupy movement

Venue: Arcola Tent, 2-8 Ashwin Street, London, E8 3DL

Date: Sunday 19 February, 2012

Time: 3:00pm and 7:00pm

Ticket prices: £12 (£10)

Venue Box Office: 020 7503 1646 or http://www.arcolatheatre.com 

For all enquiries and ticket requests, please contact:  German Munoz of Six Degrees Productions on 07854 231 085 or [email protected]

And as for my friends in Seattle, do you ever wonder why the Big Houses haven’t picked up such a wildly popular and media magnetizing idea?  Well, in fairness, maybe they will now that it is being done in London, one of the two officially approved cities for sourcing new plays.

doyle

Imagine a science fiction species that loses weight by breathing and poops bacteria instead of digested food. Can you picture it? If not, my friend doyle has a suggestion: go look in a mirror.

I met doyle on the internet. I feel closer to doyle than some people I have shared a bathroom with for years. I have only met doyle once in person. I want doyle to bury me.

All of that is tangential to the main point, which is that doyle has a blog called Science teacher and I think you should follow it.

Michael Doyle was born in Northern New Jersey, a good-for-nothing Mick like so many no-good-for-nothing Micks born in Northern New Jersey. (By the way, he prefers to refer to himself as “Oirish” as if that were somehow more PC.) He worked briefly as long shoreman. He went to med school. He became a pediatrician and worked in the ER and the projects. Think about that for a second. An emergency room pediatrician in Newark. You may think you know hell, but doyle has a crisper acquaintance with the place.

The reason I call doyle “doyle” and not “Michael Doyle” or “Michael” or “Dr. Doyle” or even “Doyle”, is that “doyle” was all I knew him by for months. We met as contributors to an on-line gathering site for weirdos and writers and weirdo writers called Everything₂, a quasi-prophetic mash-up of Face Book and Wikipedia if the former only allowed text and the latter had a sense of humor. I’m not sure the following piece is the first thing I ever read  of doyle’s, but I do remember it arrested me. He  was on pilgrimage to some mid-western city where his sister had recently died in a car crash.

December 9, 2004 (person)

The driver seat is still intact--inside scattered cd's with burgundy stains, her impossibly colored scarf, glass, pens. A bottle of chardonnay meant to be shared with her love survived. The other side of the car is splayed open, a gaping wound letting in rain, letting in sunshine.

I picked up a couple of cd's--Frankie Allison and the Odd Sox....and now my hands with bright red blotches, my sister's blood when she bled for the last time. I absently rubbed my hands on my jeans--the bright red dulled to burgundy again. I took the scarf with me.

Last summer a feral cat mutilated a mourning dove near my garden. I gave it water. It took a little. It hopped a few feet. It died. Its partner would not leave. It looked sad. A tiny puff of feathers still marks where the broken bird fell.

Her ashes are in a cardboard box, decorated with construction paper, stickers, sparkly glue, and (of course) hearts.

I kept going back in the car, not sure what I was looking for, but sure I would not find it.

At least I got something right this week.

Doyle and I hit it off early. He seemed to like my plays about science and my doggerel poems. I liked pretty much everything he wrote.

During my teaching rounds, I will occasionally show pediatric residents wheat berries, and ask them what they think they are. These fine young minds have been charged with teaching nutrition to parents, so quizzing them about the most common source of grain calories in this part of the world should be fair game.

I have yet to have an American born physician get it right.

My other Everythingian buddy “iceowl” grew up with doyle and liked to fascinate me with stories about him. (Keep in mind when you read the following that iceowl has been to Antarctica three times and has written about it better than Hemmingway ever could have.)

[Doyle’s] done much more for humanity than I have.  I'm just a silicon valley idiot…  He is one of those guys who is blessed to do well doing exactly what he wants in the world.  Classic Joseph Campbell example of, "Following your bliss."  He wants very little from the world, and gives a lot.  So, Doyle couldn't possibly do anything he didn't want to do because the worst that happens is he gets nothing for his efforts, and he's perfectly happy sleeping under the highway overpass if it comes to that …..  He just wants to do things none of us could stomach for more than a day - like dodging bullets and the cops both while illegally vaccinating kids in inner city Newark.

Five years ago doyle hung up has white physician’s coat and traded it for the white lab coat of a high school science teacher. He calls his students his "lambs", though I suspect few of them understand how closely he has observed the slaughter in his former life.

In his blog he mixes the same blend of adoration and frustration that I came to love him for at Everything₂. Here he is breathlessly elevating a discourse on respiration to a paean of the universe, because as he sees it— and trust me, doyle sees it as it is— there is no meaningful difference between the two. (I’ll do my best to capture doyle’s rapturously manic formatting.)

 

Carbon dioxide that traveled through the hearts 
of every child in our class.

Carbon dioxide expelled as a sigh, 
broken down by a few brain cells that would
rather do anything but this school thing.

We ruin it, this carbon dioxide communion, reducing it to hieroglyphics on a page, to be regurgitated by spilling bubbles on a sheet, a religiously messy communion of sorts sterilized to a formula:

 

C₆H₁₂O₆ +6 O₂ =>  6H₂O + 6CO₂

 

And yet, for a moment, the moment before eating the bean, a few students allow themselves the beauty and the power of the story to let them believe what they've always known to be true, that this whole life business, as messy and complicated and incomprehensible as it seems, gets down to this:

Each living thing, every living thing, shares an intimate bond that goes beyond the language of science, beyond the language of art, beyond human boundaries.

The universe belongs to all of us, as we belong to it.

No matter how we do in school, no matter what we know, now matter what we do.

I would trade all the biochemical pathways we "teach" for a child's grasping, for more than a moment, that we are indeed the stuff of the universe around us, and that this stuff cycles through us, is us.

 

Without an iota of the effort I put into it, Doyle writes the way I yearn to, with a high-wire walker’s combination of improvisation and precision. Because he flat-out knows so much, thanks to an enormous education and equally enormous experience, he can produce an uncannily free of flow of ideas without the so-much-smoke-blowing of so many formally educated, professionally self-identified “writers”. After I’ve been steeping myself in his prose for a while, I start to feel my own prose improving, taking flight. It could just be my imagination; but given how much both doyle and I believe in imagination, I’ll take it.

Neil Gaiman first introduced me to the Talmudic legend of the 36 Tzaddikim in his Sandman series. "They say that the world rests on the backs of 36 living saints – 36 unselfish men and women. Because of them the world continues to exist. They are the secret kings and queens of this world." I’m not going to come out and say Doyle is a Tzaddik. Such a pronouncement would be absurd, given the the legend’s clear and emphatic stipulation that no one can know who the 36 are. 

I just have my suspicions is all.

 

Photo by Susan LaRusse Eckert, used with permission of the subject, who only asked that I note: "She's a little pissed off at me now--I tend to do that. I'd be much obliged if you mentioned that I'm truly sorry for my, um, knuckleheadedness."