Between Stages

Tuesday, May 22, 2007

2 Guys

I’m not exactly what one would call a "man’s man." That is to say: I don’t generally hang out with other guys. I’m not opposed to “a night out with the guys,“ but I generally don’t see the point. When my wife’s not around and I have nothing else to do, I generally prefer to be solitary. (You can get a lot more writing done that way . . .) but marrying my wife has meant quite often being around at least one guy. He and I started hanging out when my wife and I started dating. Over time, I guess I've probably been around him more than any other guy in the past couple of years. We’ve come to tolerate each oth quite effectively. We’re both pretty solitary.

I could hear him wheezing even before he came into the room. I politely avoided the subject of his asthma the way he politely avoided the subject of mine. Some things don’t need to be spoken between guys. Some things bear some level of explanation, though . . . even if they’re patently obvious.

“It’s an ice pack, what does it look like?”

“Meow,”

“Because there’s sinus pressure in my inner ear. It kinda hurts.”

“Meow.”

“I already saw a doctor. I’m just waiting for the ear to clear-up.”

“Meow”

We had reached a silence. Whenever we talk, I politely avoid mentioning that he’s a cat and he politely avoids mentioning that I’m not. (Some things are better left unsaid.) He hopped onto the foot of the bed and curled-up at my feet. I fell asleep . . .

Being a cat, he sometimes enters my dreams. It’s a bit weird, but I’ve gotten used to it. In the dream, we headed down to Axel’s for a beer. This was obviously a dream: I never go to Axel’s and I don’t recall ever going out drinking with my wife’s male cat.

We walked into the hole-in-the-wall dive and ordered a couple of Guinnesses. There was a silent moment as the bartender brought out a glass for me and a dish for him. We sat down at neighboring bar stools and looked around. The place was dead. We glanced up at the television over the bar. The Brewers were playing. This was not a source of conversation, as neither of us follow sports.

“Finally passed that meaningless test at the Day Job.” I said idly.

“Meow,” he replied casually. He leaned-in to lap Guinness from a small glass dish with the Miller Light logo on it which rested on the bar in front of him.

“I know, I know . . . I need to find better work. The only reason they can get away with half the stuff they do is because they’re the only ones who do what they do.”

“Meow.”

And so on . . . We staggered back to the apartment just in time for me to wake-up from the dream. My ear was just a little better. The cat was still at the foot of the bed. . .

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Monday, May 21, 2007

The Cultural Iconography of My Generation

At the office of the Wretched Day Job, I overheard a girl mentioning to someone that her middle name was “Cheetara.” (Yes: that Cheetara.) I’m not saying that I actually believe this. (It seems unlikely to me.) This is not to say that I’d be entirely against people naming their children after mid-‘80’s cartoon characters. I'm wth Frank Zappa on this one: name your kids whatever you want. I’m simply doubting that anyone would choose that particular name. But . . . let’s say for the sake of an argument that she was telling the truth about her middle name. It says something strange about the cultural iconography of my generation that people who have been named after Thundercats are now old enough to legally vote. I’m not sure how I feel about this . . . it may not hold any significance at all. In any case, it just sounds weird.

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Sunday, May 20, 2007

Just Break EVERYTHING

After the curtain lowered on the Skylight's show at the Broadway Theatre Center’s main stage, I’d crossed through to the lobby of the studio theatre to use the men’s room only to find a host of people milling around in faux chain mail carrying swords, shields and such. Milwaukee Shakespeare’s production of 1 Henry IV was approaching the end of its penultimate performance, which found me falling into a conversation with Noel--the Company Manager. One of the actors (Jake Russo, I believe) was practicing his golf swing with a broadsword as Noel related to me some of the injuries sustained in the production over the course of the show’s run. They’d made some half a dozen trips to the ER since the show opened . . . really, REALLY bad luck.

Luck is, of course, a problem. Some people are more sensitive to it than others. I seem to remember overhearing bits of conversation about the nature of this amongst Chicago theatre types in the early 1990’s. Memory may have embellished the conversation over the years, but it went something like this: The old cliché of professional stage actors being superstitious is completely understandable. Any one living out a normal life outside the stage knows how difficult it is to get things right at any single moment in a world of uncertainty. Imagine the stress of having to get everything right while re-living the same 90 minutes over and over again for a whole month with a crowd of people watching every time. Excessive superstition in most people is a sign of neurosis. In a professional actor, superstition is more like and adaptation than neurosis.

In a world where success is so given to the whims of chance, superstition can keep anyone sane. For the most superstitious however, the act of wishing someone good luck before a performance raises all kinds of questions: “Why is this person wishing me luck? Why would I need any more good luck than I already have? Haven’t we rehearsed this thing enough? Does this person wishing me luck have some sort of bad feeling about what’s going to happen tonight? . . .” and so on into the inevitable abyss of neurosis that usually comes of most good intensions. Seeing a friend or colleague before a performance and not wishing them well in some way, however, could be seen as being quite rude. This is, presumably where the practice of wishing someone bad luck before a performance originated. According to the Antonym Theory, the old cliché of telling someone to “break a leg,” came out of the desire to wish someone good luck by wishing them bad luck. The Antonym Theory is, of course, complete nonsense, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t at least some truth to it. The cliché had fallen out of favor with actors in Chicago in the early ‘90’s. The reason for this, theoretically being the fact that, being a cliché, “break a leg,” began to sound insincere. They started telling each other to, “break limbs,” before a performance. Somehow, “break limbs,” sounded more sincere than “break a leg.” (Notice here that the phrase is still derivative of “break a leg,” and not “throw your back out,” “Get struck be a broadsword,” “get bit by a dog,” or any of the other unfortunate events which have plagued the cast of Milwaukee Shakespeare’s final show of the season.) The problem is that, once a sentiment falls into popular usage, it instantly starts to seem pretty insincere. There has got to be a more enduringly authentic way of wishing a performer the bad luck they need to have truly good luck.

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Tuesday, May 08, 2007

Matt Cook . . . Bombs?

Matt Cook is a brilliant East Side poetry icon. Somewhere in that vast Cookian neurology rests the strange alchemy that can turn, "some guy at a bar who works as a janitor at UWM," into, "an instructor at Marquette with a voice heard on a Nike commercial and a Bill Moyers compilation." What I’m trying to say here is: everybody who has performed poetry on the East Side of Milwaukee for long enough has a Matt Cook impression. On Monday night, May 9th at Poet’s Monday on the stage of Linneman’s Riverwest Inn, those in attendance got to see Matt Cook’s Matt Cook impression. Honestly, I’ve seen better.

Cook’s been published by a small company out of California called Manic D Press. Cook's material can, presumably, be found on shelves at well-stocked chain mega-bookstores all over the country. His third book The Unreasonable Slug is a follow-up to his first two: Eavesdrop Soup and In The Small of My Backyard. Having heard Cook read excerpts from that third book on the 9th, one gets the impression that it isn’t very good in comparison to the first two. The fact that one could get the same impression from actually reading the book is not the point. The point is this: Matt Cook, who has almost never failed to deliver a good performance . . . performed poorly. The audience seemed polite. They clapped at what seemed like pre-designated intervals. Normally, a Cook audience doesn’t have a chance to be polite. Normally they’re too busy rolling around the absurdly incomprehensible corners of his thoughts. Everybody has a Matt Cook impression. Last night we got to see his. It was awful. He was nervous—visibly sweating. No doubt aware of the fact that he wasn't doing well, he started perorming louder. This is the equivalent of watching Arnold Palmer or Tiger Woods' efforts not having the desired effect on the golf course and seeing them react to the situation by hitting the ball harder with each swing.

The poetry in that third book seems inspired by Cook, but not written by him. It’s weird hearing Matt Cook trying to read a poem inspired by Matt Cook that was actually written by Matt Cook. What’s worse, Matt Cook’s bad stuff is actually better than most of the good stuff that gets performed on the East Side, so it wasn’t actually unpleasant, just uncomfortable, confusing and disappointing. My wife and I had looked forward to it since his last Poet’s Monday reading. Matt Cook had let us down. It reminds me of a poem he wrote about Stravinsky—how people rioted after The Rite Of Spring because it wasn’t very good. People were disappointed. Note here that even seeing a bad performance by Matt Cook reminds me of really good poetry by Matt Cook.

Since Matt Cook bombed last night, everything’s been slightly out of synch. Busses have been off schedule. People have been making the wrong number of left turns. Squirrels have appeared more confused than usual. The cats seem listless. Late in the day, my wife and I head off to a café for a romantic meal . . . things begin to seem better. Matt Cook will write again. Matt Cook will write better stuff. The day fades into night . . .

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Tuesday, April 24, 2007

When The Illusion Drops

The morning shifts hazily into view beyond the precipice of dream and it’s already been a long week. There’s a strange alchemy to those moments when the illusion drops and dream fades out into the bizarre fugue of logic we call reality. Every stage production has those moments . . . when the programmed illusion fades out into the reality around it. In big budget professional productions the illusion usually fades out subtly and briefly, but I’ve seen it stop shows before.

I remember a blistering hot day in the outdoor space of the American Players Theatre some time ago. It was a matinee--not cloud in the sky. The heat was accompanied by a humidity rarely experienced outside of a jungle. A surprising number of people in the audience WEREN’T leaving. I seem to recall Brian Robert Mani performing Shakespeare center stage amidst a fully stocked, fully outfitted APT production. The play was unfolding as well as could be expected under the circumstances. Gradually it became apparent that a smartly beheadsetted techie was walking straight down the center aisle onto the stage. For a single moment, one could clearly see the character filter out of Mani as the reality of the play shifted into the background. Reality slowly shifted gears. Apparently, someone in the audience had passed out of heat stroke. The show had continued some time later to complete the full performance, but it’s always a strange moment when a respectably expensive production of a Shakespeare play gets cut-off in mid-scene.

Some time later, there was another matinee of another work of Shakespeare’s. It wasn’t as hot, but it was just as impressive. Milwaukee Shakespeare’s production of 1 Henry IV was ending its first weekend. The show was well underway. All the elements of a really enthralling production of Shakespearian drama were just beginning to hit their stride as Jeffrey Withers carried his end of the play by performing a bit of dialogue in the role of Prince Hal when . . . suddenly and without warning (or even breaking momentum in speech) Withers related to everyone in the audience that he had thrown his back out in a previous scene and couldn’t focus on anything. The illusion dropped so suddenly that the rest of the cast seemed caught completely off guard by it. It was unreal--everything fell in a second. The whole reality of what as going on dissipated without warning. Moments like that in theatre make it feel all the more possible that moments like that could happen between the stages. You're walking down the treet and sudenly a techie turns to you to tell you the show needs to stop . . . and you realize this isn't your life at all.

Milwaukee Shakespeare elected to end the show there and make the proper adjustments for all in attendance. Putting another actor in the role was out of the question, as the fight scenes are so tightly choreographed for the tiny space of the Broadway Theatre Center’s Studio Theatre that it just wouldn’t’ve worked with anyone else in the role. They’ve canceled tonight’s Wednesday the 25th of April performance as well, allowing Withers one more night to recover from the moment when the illusion dropped.

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