Just Wrought

Sandbox Radio Shoots Bumber

I know, I know.  The biggest complaint about Sandbox Radio Live! is that the super fun recording sessions are always sold out, making it damned tough to watch the magic being made.  Of course, the final magic is always eventually available to you as a podcast.  In fact, Episode 5: “An Unexpected Twist” just recently dropped and is available here .

But now Seattle’s beloved arts festival Bumbershoot is offering a one time solution to this conundrum.  This coming Labor Day (September 3) is your chance to see a “best of Sandbox Radio Live!” at the Center Theatre in the Armory, which has about thrice as many seats as our usual venue.  We will start at 7pm and pack an episode’s worth of fabulousness in just one hour. 

Here’s what’s in store:

"Notes from the Workplace" by Vincent Delaney

"Why We Run" by Scot Augustson

PSAs for Hanford Challenge and World Arts Access

A blues tune from Charles Leggett and The Sandbox Radio Orchestra.

Ads from "The Back of the 358" and a teaser for what's coming in Markheim by Paul Mullin

"T-Minus" by Elizabeth Heffron

"Barcarolle" from Tales of Hoffman featuring special guest soprano Heather Curtis Mullin,  and more!

You read that correctly.  My wife will be singing.  And I will be acting: reprising my role of Sam, Prince of the World, in my on-going noir angel detective series, Markheim.  That makes this Bumbershoot performance the very first time that Heather and I have shared a professional stage.  So come see Sandbox Radio Live! at Bumbershoot and watch some hot history being made.

 

Exploring Alternative Narrative Structure

 

 

It doesn’t happen often, and when it does I always manage to kvetch about it, but I am teaching again, this time at Hugo House, and with a broader scope than just playwriting.  Here’s the pitch. . . .

 

Exploring Alternative Narrative Structure

Aristotle said a story should have a beginning, middle and end, in that order; but how often does life really feel like that? Sometimes to reflect reality we have to challenge old assumptions about how we experience and process narrative. We will explore alternatives to Aristotle’s cherished mountain of rising action, looking at classical music forms, technology, architecture, political systems and biology for potential models.  Indeed, no source of inspiration will be excluded. Famous examples of effective use of alternative narrative form will be examined, including Pinter’s Betrayal, Thorton Wilder’s “The Pullman Car Hiawatha,” Italo Calvino’s novels and Paul Mullin’s Louis Slotin Sonata.  Finally, we’ll examine our current writing projects and determine how they might benefit from some structural shake-ups.

 

If you’re interested, your best bet is to register on line here.

Uplift of Fear

I just ran across these impressions I jotted to myself after surviving my stint as a “virgin” actor in the last 14/48. It seems appropriate to post them, with the Kamikaze artists draw less than 10 hours away.

The terror hit me like a fever about a half hour before the first show’s curtain. The day went by in a punishing blur: a vivid dream in which one is never really sure how much time is going by until suddenly someone is saying “We tech in 20 minutes.” And then someone else is saying, “Let’s break for dinner.” And then someone else is saying, “Places for Show One, people, places.”

“Thank you, places.”

I was in the second of seven ten-minute plays. I stood in the house-right vom looking up and out onto the stage, half-watching and listening to the first play, a funny piece about swinger birds by Doug Willott called "Duck/Penguin". I couldn’t really concentrate on the piece, since I was undergoing a vast existential amazement: confounded and astounded that somehow the individual circumstances of my life had brought me here to this deeply horrifyingly moment. Why was I here? Who does this to themselves? It’s one thing to be an asshole, but only a stupid asshole plots his own very public humiliation. 

It was an oddly uplifted dismay.  Nothing depressed or depressive about it. 

And then the lights were changing and the band was playing and I was going on. As I noted in my earlier essay, as an actor, once you’re on you’re on. The terror doesn’t disappear, but it is forced by the demands of actual performance to sit in the back seat and shut the fuck up. There’s nothing you can do when you’re sliding down the mountain except make your goddamned best effort to steer and maybe hope to outrun the avalanche. 

And then I was marching offstage. And then I was done.  For a couple hours at least. I still had the second show, which now, miraculously, I wasn’t dreading at all.

By the first show of the second day the process had actually become fun, though terror was still sitting there in the back seat, sitting on her hands.

 

The rewards of theatrical risk-taking should accrue, first and foremost, to the audience.

What is the best way you have ever seen sex staged?