Between Stages

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.

(0) Comments • (0) Trackbacks • Permalink

Tuesday, April 10, 2007

Finessing The Titanic’s Memory

The lights onstage were going up and down as actors spoke fragments of lines. It was late. I was lying on the floor between the seats of the Astor Theatre and the vertical wooden slats that separate it from the rest of the Brady Street Pharmacy. I might’ve been trying to sleep. Things have been very busy lately. My energy is stuck somewhere between working a day job, reviewing shows and working on my own quasi-marketable stuff as the first Tech rehearsal for TITANIC made its long, slow migration across the stage.

Pink Banana Theatre’s mini-festival of one-acts has had a long, circuitous pre-performance journey. It’s almost ready to launch. Hopefully everything is ready to go for opening night this coming Friday the 13th. I can’t speak for everyone else in the production, but my own little ten-minute piece of the show has been finely finessed and ready to go. It’s a simple, little dialogue about marriage, amnesia and time-travel set in a food court in a shopping mall in 1987. I call it "Memory."

Do It Yourself Theatre works best in simplicity. I thought I had it nailed: One man. One woman. Two chairs. A table. The dialogue is all in the acting. Simple, right?

As open auditions started Oscar Night at the Astor Theater, it became apparent that my simple little eight minute dialogue might’ve been impossible to cast. The crowd coming-in to audition for TITANIC was . . . young. It turned out that I wasn’t looking for a man and a woman for the dialogue: I was looking for a man and a woman who could pass for being in their thirties. Undergraduates. There were so many undergraduates coming in to audition. It was mildly spirit crushing: Here’s a girl who has a great deal of talent, but she’s 18 and looks 16. Here’s a guy who has an interesting presence who can deliver lines, but he’s nowhere near the right age. And then there was the older set: people who would’ve had difficulty passing for thirty year-olds from the other end of the spectrum. Somewhere around the end of the second night of open auditions a woman who looks like she could pass for being thirty shows-up . . . she’s really talented, too . . . I remember seeing her in a production of "Einstein’s Dreams" at UWM . . . but she opens her mouth to speak and she has a French accent. It turns out I’m looking for a man and a woman who could pass for being thirty who sound like they’re from the Midwest. I had no idea this was going to be so difficult.

Thanks to MySpace and Insurgent Theatre, I’ve found a couple of actors for the dialogue. She makes a living as a microbiologist. He’s a neo-pagan shaman. They’re both very talented. It's all true. I wouldn’t know how to make any of this up.

Pink Banana’s TITANIC runs the 13th, 14th, 20th and 21st at the Astor Theatre. The show starts at 8pm. It’s free. All of it. It's all free.

(0) Comments • (0) Trackbacks • Permalink

Sunday, February 25, 2007

I Got Hit By A Car

It was around 7:20 pm in Bay View on Thursday, February 22nd, 2007. The lateness of the #15 bus had thwarted my best efforts at making the opening night of the new Allegro show on time. I was waiting for a bus on the East Side for about an hour. Good thing I left two hours before the show started. It meant that I was only going to be fifteen minutes late. I made a call and some exceedingly nice people offered to pick me up and bring me to the show from what was going to be the Southeast corner of KK and Oklahoma. I had begun to cross Oklahoma from the Northeast corner.

It was a green light and I was walking the cross walk under the authority of a walk signal. I had crossed the Westbound lane and made it roughly halfway across the Eastbound lane when I noticed that my feet weren’t underneath me anymore. They were straight ahead of me traveling eastbound quite quickly with the rest of my body. I then noticed a tremendous pain in my lower back as I hit the street on it. It took me quite some time to realize that I was swearing. Not at anyone or anything in particular. Just in general. I was walking towards the corner I was trying to get to in the first place when I noticed that there was a man walking towards me. Then a thought occurred to me that seemed rather important: I Had Been Hit By A Car. The gentleman who was asking me if I was okay had been behind the wheel of that car when it hit me. I don’t recall answering his question directly. I hadn’t quite gotten through the swearing part of Getting Hit By A Car. The gentleman, no doubt, took this and the fact that I was walking around to mean that I wasn’t hurt too badly. He went on to discuss other things.

“I didn’t see you standing there,” he said. This seemed hideously manipulative to me at the time. To me, it seemed to suggest that, seeing as how there couldn’t have been any witnesses to the accident, it was my word against his and as far as he was concerned he wasn’t at fault because I was standing still in the middle of the intersection wen he hit me. I would come to realize later when my head had cleared enough from the accident that this guy was probably pretty guileless about the whole thing. He took that left turn at what was a very irresponsible speed and probably wasn't paying much attention to any pedestrian who might’ve been in his path. He wouldn’t have seen me until he hit me going far faster than I was. It would’ve appeared to him like I was standing still in comparison.

I did the only natural thing I could do at that point: stand there swearing and feeling a tremendous pain in my lower back as I waited for people to pick me up and take me to the show. It occurs to me that I probably didn’t tell the gentleman who had hit me why I was simply standing there. He continued to make certain I was okay and, as far as I could make out at the time, ensure that I thought he was not at fault. A small car began to pull up to where we were standing. The gentleman asked me if it was someone I knew. I answered in all honesty that I wasn’t sure, which probably sounded kind of weird to him at the time. The woman behind the wheel of the small car identified herself as a nurse. She asked me if I had hit my head. She asked me if I was feeling any numbness in my limbs. My reply to her question sounded perfectly natural to me, but again, probably sounded a bit strange to the both of them coming from a guy who just Got Hit By A Car.

“No,” I said to the nurse, “neurologically I’m fine. I just have this tremendous pain in my lower back.” That’s often the way I talk. The nurse and the guy who hit me with his car stood there in awkward silence for a moment. This guy had just related to me the insane notion that I was standing still in the middle of an intersection in Bay View and suddenly I was the one who was crazy. The nurse drove off. Moments later, people had come to take me to the show.

“Is your friend coming with you?” One of them asked as I got into the vehicle.

“No,” I said, “He’s just some guy who hit me. With his car.” There was a brief discussion. It was decided that I would be fine to make it to the show. I went to the emergency room with my wife later on that night. Surprisingly, everything was fine and I'm well on my way to recovery. I even made it to three more shows this past weekend. Not without considerable pain and stiffness in my lower back, however. That’s because I Got Hit By A Car Thursday night.

(2) Comments • (0) Trackbacks • Permalink

Tuesday, February 06, 2007

Finessing The Titanic

Like much of the country, my wife and her younger sister were sitting on the couch watching the Super Bowl Commercials as I prepared to leave the apartment on one of the coldest nights of the year. The Bears had just made a field-length kickoff return for a touchdown in the opening seconds of the game as Carrie and Allison sat on the couch disinterestedly leafing through magazines, quietly waiting for the next commercial break. In seconds, I was out the door to meet with some people about The Titanic.

Yes, it WAS below zero outside, but comfortably so. The #15 wasn’t far from the stop when I got there, so I didn’t have to wait long. There at the head of the bus sitting perpendicular to me was a young woman with an actress’ look about her. The bus rolled through mostly empty streets, quickly arriving at Brady Street. As the bus rolled past Brady Street Pharmacy, myself and the actress-eque girl both looked at it in the same way and rung the bell to signal a stop.

The Brady Street Pharmacy is a strange pseudo-urban hybrid space. The place is a privately owned old-style pharmacy-diner fashioned out of a space that once held a cinema house. They’ve converted part of the building into a performance space now known as the Astor Theatre. I walked through the door of the pharmacy/diner/theatre. The actress-esque girl was not more than few minutes behind me. It didn’t take long to spot John Manno. Manno is a freelance classical harpist who spends some of his spare time writing plays and looking vaguely like Steve Carell. He’s also helming a rather interesting project for the Pink Banana Theatre Company which shares a name with both the most successful motion picture of all time AND the most famous naval wreck of all time. Manno’s Titanic has nothing to do with either.

A reasonably strange mix of something like a dozen people had shown up to discuss The Titanic project. The idea is about as ambitious as low-or-no-budget theatre goes. It’s a very long program featuring 15 to 17 short plays written by local playwrights (myself included) that will be staged the 13th, the 14th, the 20th, and the 21st of April. There will be no charge for admission. Everyone is welcome to come. As one could probably imagine, there are numerous dangers involved in a project of this scope. My biggest fear is that no one shows. There’s nothing worse than a free show that almost no one has decided to attend . . .

Open auditions are set to be held at the Astor on the 25th through the 27th of this month from 7:30 to 9:30pm. No telling who’s going to show up. This could get weird . . .

(1) Comments • (0) Trackbacks • Permalink

Friday, January 05, 2007

Restoration

The restoration of City Hall seemed particularly cozy in the March-like weather of an unseasonably warm January in Milwaukee. The spire was still covered in scaffolding. From the window high above Water Street, the wire frame of the spire was clearly visible. They'd taken off all of the metal paneling . . . apparently to be replaced later on. It was late in the morning. You could see people scurrying about working on the restoration. On the other side of the window, an entirely different kind of restoration was being done on my teeth.

The woman cleaning them was telling me about her experience rehearsing with the Florentine Opera for its upcoming production of Macbeth. The woman who cleans my teeth will play one of the witches. The Artistic Director of Milwaukee Shakespeare will be directing the Florentne’s production. Apparently the woman cleaning my teeth had briefly served as her yoga instructor some time ago during pregnancy. The production has been mixing theatre people with opera people who are unfamiliar with the superstition surrounding a production of The Scottish Play. They apparently spent some time discussing the specifics of when it was superstitiously ethical to mention the name of the opera. Some of this had apparently been quite new to performers with the Florentine. One woman (A Born Again Christian) spoke quite eloquently about how the production had nothing to fear for various pious Christian reasons. It had been explained to her and the rest of the cast that certain superstitious standards must be maintained just by way of respect for those who WERE superstitious about the bad luck surrounding Macbeth. They were actually being taught superstition in the service of etiquette. Strange.

The woman cleaning my teeth continued, gently scraping calculus away from the edges of my teeth as lines of workmen moved about various levels of scaffolding outside the window near the top of city hall. Apparently, a substantial chunk of the opera has been edited down "for Milwaukee Audiences." This turns an extremely long opera into one that is only reasonably long. Certainly there have been some rather tasty bits of music that have been tossed out in the process. The yoga instructor/opera singer commented on how much better my gums looked this time than the last time I was in. No cavities. I still need to deal with my wisdom teeth. They’re still working on City Hall.

(0) Comments • (0) Trackbacks • Permalink