Just Wrought

Live Blogging Swing Time: Scot Augustson and Cousin Katie

I have known and loved Scot Augustson’s work as a playwright since I first saw one of his plays (about sex, of course) in the Seattle Fringe Festival in the mid 90’s. I have known the person, Scot, since the late 90’s, and I have known him well since the early Zeroes. To know Scot Augustson well is to, of course, love him, blahblahblah…but it is also to know that he nurses a secret, delightfully nasty side, which he does not necessarily share with mere acquaintances. With acquaintances, he’s a lot like Katie, title character in his ongoing serial “Cousin Katie” (brilliantly voiced by the incomparable Annette Toutonghi).

The plot of “Cousin Katie” contains all kinds of absurd turns, but it’s important to remember that the more absurd a particular plot point is, the more likely it is to have actually happened in Scot’s life.

Teaser highlights from “Cousin Katie”:

• A Cliff-Notes History of A-pod-ments in Seattle.
• “No smoking, but we haven’t made rules about vaping yet. It’s a gray area.
• A small-state/big-state between “Katie from Ketchikan”  and “Rhonda from Rhode Island”.
• “Oh baby Jesus riding a pony in the circus parade!”
• “We in the pods have our own brand of justice.”

There are still a handful of seats left. Come on down and grab some.

 

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Live Blogging Swing Time: The Riveting Rosies

Just watched The Riveting Rosies sound check.  WOW!  Come just for them and it’ll be well worth the price of admission.

 

Live Blogging SWING TIME: There but for the Grace of God Goes Jimmy Connors

You have to come to Sandbox Radio Live's "Swing Time" if only just to see the gloriously goofy way that the amazing SBRL sound fX crew creates the sound of a tennis match for Tina Rowley's memoir essay "There but for the Grace of God Goes Jimmy Connors."

Git yer tix!

Live Blogging SWING TIME: Load-In

I took off work today. Nothing sneaky like calling in sick. Nope, I bit the bullet and burned a pre-arranged vacation day, so that I could be at ACT all day in advance of Sandbox Radio’s “Swing Time” going up tonight at 8 pm. As an actor, I’m not called until noon (as a writer, I’m not called at all), and since I’m only in Act I.  I’m not really needed until much later that that, but I volunteered to help with the load-in. It’s something that all genuine theatre artists do, at least every so often. Here’s why…

All good and true theatre is subversive in some way. Always. It might be subversive in content, but that’s really just a surface aspect. Theatre’s true subversion comes from just existing, when all rights and logic, it shouldn’t. (If this sounds vaguely philosophical, then let me put some practical actuality around it. Václav Havel, the first president of a free Czech Republic, was a playwright before his political success. He made theatre that threatened the Soviet –backed status quo. The powers-that-were would have gladly silenced him, and sometimes did, but the subversive nature of theatre made it impossible for the totalitarian regime to shut up Havel, and other subversive theatre artists, for long.

Shows like Sandbox Radio Live! “Swing Time” aren’t supposed to happen. They don’t fit any preconceived notion of what theatre is or should be. In fact, Sandbox Radio Live!, like all good and true theatre, explodes those notions. Theatre at its best provides a venue for ideas and visions that don’t fit into the money-making machine of corporate story-telling (i.e. Hollywood, Broadway, etc.)

And in order for such wonderful subversion to take place, sometimes the artists need to make it happen with sweat equity and sheer force of will, doing jobs they were never trained for, working hours no one ever warned them about. 

And thus the result is like nothing you’ve ever seen. Guaranteed.

Git yer tix. (There’s only a handful left.)

 

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Live Blogging “Swing Time” – The Sunday Run-through

I’m watching the first act of Sandbox Radio LIVE!: "Swing Time", which we will be performing live tomorrow at ACT in downtown Seattle, but will also be broadcasting via podcast as soon as we sweeten the sound.

I can relax a little for the moment because my two bits aren’t until act two.  As per usual, I’m Sam in episode 12 of Markheim, but I also got drafted as a concessions vendor in our staging of the classic baseball balladry, “Casey at the Bat”.

There’s an intense ambient confusion to late process rehearsals—cue-to-cues and dress runs, etc.—that I find deeply unnerving, even though as a playwright I usually had absolutely zero responsibilities. Amidst the tumult, I am grateful for directors in a way I usually don’t admit to. I recall, at these times, my deep admiration for anyone who can handle chaos—indeed choreograph it— with expertise and élan. Two names leap to mind, Leslie Law, the director and producer of Sandbox Radio, and John Langs, who directed the Seattle premiere of my play Louis Slotin Sonata and the world premiere of The Sequence, my staging of the real-life race to decode the human genome. I offer you this memory of John, utterly out of context to protect the innocent and guilty alike, after having sat through 10 hours of tech as cool as a cucumber, then suddenly shouting: “Would someone please muzzle that fucking dog!”  The show’s mascot Jack Russell Terrier had apparently rubbed John’s last nerve raw.

For now, I get to sit and blog to you, gentle reader, about how much I love Juliette Pruzan’s particular whimsy, which you’ll be able to witness yourself in her original piece, “Swing Time Swing Set” written especially for this show, and performed with delight by Seanjohn Walsh, Kathryn Van Meter, Amy Bush and others. I pride myself on knowing where the laughs will come in a new work.  I’m not always right, but I can assure you there are plenty in this one. Probably some you’ll surprise us with when you come see tomorrow.

If you haven’t already, get your tix here.

 

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Writing is Liquid

I was tagged by Lola Lindle as next in line to share thoughts about writing for the #MyWritingProcess Blog Tour. This turned out to be fortuitous, since I was already noodling on an essay about writing and Lola’s kind nod served to light a fire under my ass to finish it. So hearty thanks to Lola Lindle, and all the writers who have participated in the tour so far.

Link-surfing back through the tour I found these four questions to which I assume I should address my remarks:

 

What am I working on?

How does my work differ from others of its genre?

Why do I write what I do?

How does my writing process work?

 

 

Counting Down to the End of Markheim

 

I wrote the first episode of Markheim on a lark. It was several years ago, late in December, that time in corporate America when honestly nothing gets done, but you’re still expected to haunt your cubicle, like the living ghost of Bob Cratchit. I wanted to write a Christmas script, but something also hip and nasty, like we put on at AHA! Theatre for the variety show JunkXmas, way back in the mid-1990’s. It was really only a sketch of a play, tossed off and forgotten. The idea being to mash-up the nearly unnavigable moralities of LeCarre’s brilliant thrillers with the blunt choppy dialogue of Hammett’s incomparable detective stories, with maybe a little Miltonian angelology thrown in for texture.  Even when I didn’t know exactly who was talking, the dialogue seemed to flow of its own volition.

 

BEZ:  How long you think they’ll let you just wonder around over here unchaperoned?

MARKHEIM:  Why should they care?  They always get what they want.

BEZ:  Maybe.  But they ain’t crazy about... the unexpected.

MARKHEIM:  They gonna kill the golden goose?

BEZ:  They done stupider.

MARKHEIM:  True that.

BEZ:  Killed goldener.

MARKHEIM:  Yeah.  Yeah, they have.

 

Talk is cheap. Writing, tortuously expensive.

Openly We Carry

I recently mentioned this play in my last essay “The Misuses of Art” and then realized I had not posted it anywhere for those who might want to read it.

I had great fun watching my son open and close this piece at last year’s SOAPFest, as well as witness the exquisite work of his fellow cast members Tracy Hyland, Michael Patten and Heather Hawkins, so masterfully directed by Annie Lareau.  Such a great staging. I’ll never forget it.