Category: theater stuff

If you get my notes via email, you may have received a draft of this one in September. I was trying to schedule posts in advance for the weeks I knew I wasn’t available, but I accidentally sent it early. Ooops.

I pre-scheduled this because right now I am locked in a rehearsal room in downtown LA working on this play. I did a small reading of it in NYC in October, which was like placing a pillow under its head and asking if it wants some warm milk. Right now, however, I’m gouging it with a hunting knife and ordering it not to bleed on my nice white carpet.

Why?

Because it’s a one-person play.

I don’t like one-person plays.

For one, they invoke in me a sort-of empathetic claustrophobia for the performer. “That poor gal is stuck on that stage for a whole hour with no air! Get her out of there!”

But my bigger issue, I think, involves my struggle as an audience member to understand my role in the narrative.

Like, if the character is talking to a literal theatre audience, as with my friend Heidi’s play, I get it. I bought a ticket and sat down and now a performer named Heidi is talking to me about stuff she cares about. My job is to pay attention to her.

I can do that. Heidi’s amazing. The show is great. Easy peasy.

And in McNally’s Master Class, which I saw at the Taper in LA a bazillion years ago, we are cast as Maria Callas’s students. My “purpose” in that audience is to stay silent and worship her so she can react.

I’ve been a devoted disciple. I know how to worship a legend. Done and done.

Underneath the Lintel by Glen Berger, Soho Playhouse, NYC 2001. A librarian gives a lecture about a book that was returned 113 years late. My role is pretty clear. I’m a person who showed up to a lecture about a book. My character likes books. Perhaps I have lots of free time. I’m… enterprising? Educated?

Check.

The Object Lesson at the Kirk Douglas in Culver City two years ago. We’re literally moving boxes and sharing food and dancing with Geoff Sobelle’s character. We have jobs! We help him build the event of the show. He can’t make his play without us. He’d have no one to dance with.

I’ve only ever read 4.48 Psychosis by Sarah Kane ’cause when it was at St. Anne’s in Brooklyn four years ago I was feeling maybe not totally emotionally prepared for it, but in it you witness a young woman’s mental collapse on stage. Your role is almost opposite to The Object Lesson; she would fall apart even if you weren’t watching. You’re basically there to hold the stories of the woman who can’t. You’re the survivor.

I’ve been a survivor. I know how to do that.

However.

When I can’t tell who I am as an audience, I get a little um nervous.

Like when the character on stage is a just a person telling horrific or humorous or meaningful stories. I’m like, did I just casually wander into a trauma circle? Why is only one of us talking?

(Is that crazy?)

I loved Will Eno’s Thom Pain at the DR2 in 2005 (didn’t see the recent revival at the Signature, sadly). I looked it up for the character breakdown:

In this show I play an anonymous passive observer cloaked in a temporary theatrical convention. Ok… but why does Thom need me there? What am I doing?

Same with Buyer and Cellar by Jonathan Tolin, which I saw at the Taper. An out-of-work actor named Alex talks about the time he got hired to work in a basement mall at Barbra Streisand’s house. He’s telling me about it because… I have no idea. Am I his friend? Are we having coffee? Why isn’t he asking me about the bleeding gash above my left eyebrow?

I don’t have a gash. But if I did, he wouldn’t ask about it.

(Am I the only person who’s been hurled into an existential void over this??)

For some reason I don’t have this problem when the performer portrays multiple characters connected by a central theme. Like with Danny Hoch’s show about gentrification called Taking Over, or Heather Raffo’s Nine parts of Desire dealing with the plight of Iraqi women.

I saw neither of these. I looked them up.

‘Cause I’m writing a one-person show, man.

By choice.

I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing.

The structure of my play hangs on an actual yoga class. Before the show begins, play-goers are invited to participate on-stage where they remain until the performance ends. They are “yoga students.”

But my character only addresses those people. She doesn’t address “the audience” at large, who is crouched behind the ol’ fourth wall.

Who the hell are they?

Am I writing a hybrid between a traditional play and an object lesson?

Do I need to account for the relationship between on-stage audience and in-house audience?

Am I doing it wrong?

No stories today, just a little plugola…

This play opens in Berkeley on Friday at Shotgun Players and runs until November 11th.  You were TOTALLY gonna take a trip to northern California soon, right? Lucky for you there’s a shit-ton of cool stuff being done there this season. Plays by Lucas Hnath,  JT Rogers, Young Jean Lee, Chris Chen, Cory Hinkle… no joke the Bay area this fall is 🔥🔥🔥.

You can read all about it in this non-firewalled article, if you can get past the dopey picture of that asshole lounging on a bed at the ACE Hotel in NYC while a ghost lingers in her window…

In 2004 I decided to write a novel. As a devoted reader of difficult books, I had massive ambitions.  I wanted to write something personal, experimental, universal, tragic, poetic, epic, complex, controversial, and affirming.

I felt capable. I took tons of notes. I began writing with great zeal.

My novel concerns itself with Tremont, a young man recovering from a mental collapse caused by the dual traumas of grad school and his mother’s rectal cancer.

He drinks whisky from the bottle. He chain-smokes ’til dawn. He reads dense social science anthologies like Rethinking Context: Language as an Interactive Phenomenon (Studies in the Social and Cultural Foundations of Language).

He’s not an asshole per se. Like he’d never purposely hurt someone. He may have broken a few hearts, but that’s just ’cause he’s young and hot and broke and maybe an alcoholic and also an aspiring writer and potentially bi-sexual.

And although he’s never pinned a woman down against her will, he considers himself an average guy. No one really knows him, though. People describe him as brooding, mysterious, charming, aloof, and wry. But he’s very very alone.

Probably because he’s tragically flawed.

I got 23 pages into writing before I started hating myself. I was regurgitating a cliché.

Of all the many many types of humans who could have inhabited My Great Novel, why had I chosen that tired-ass trope? Why was I burning brain cells out over a troubled sociopath? And why did I date him more than once? Whose wet dream was this?

Um, everyone’s, for about a decade. I came of age in the 90’s, the era of the Brilliant Damaged Bro and the Sad Chick Who Hates Herself For Loving Him. Which does NOT hold up, friends.

Luckily I figured this out before chapter three. I shut my novel down and turned the parts I didn’t hate into a play… this play!  Which is currently running in Seattle at Washington Ensemble Theatre through October 8th, if you’re in the nabe.

My hero is now a programmer chick named Jess who goes on a road trip with her dead father so she can reckon with her past and cope with her future. She’s tragically flawed (fist pump) and drinks too much, but that’s about where the similarities to my former hero end.

It’s big and messy and visual and has a killer cast and a brilliant design team and a smart-as-hell director. But if you like your plays straightforward with cleanly drawn lines and one clear sonorous wail of a message, definitely stay home and watch Reality Bites again. Please.

Jess has a monologue in a dive bar where she discusses the kind of dude she wants to take home that night, if you’d like a taste:

THIS CHICK WALKS INTO A BAR...