Speaking of Ensembles...

Renowned ensemble-based theatre artists, Hand2Mouth Theatre will be in Seattle this weekend for Bumbershoot, doing their new site-specific performance, Project X:You Are Here.

Here's how they describe it:
Project X: You Are Here is a performance installation investigating the human desire to live longer, to live life to the fullest, and to leave a legacy. It is a collective time capsule and a live event created especially for Bumbershoot 2008 to capture and record the life experiences of Festival attendees. Audience members are active participants who can contribute their own experience, memory, and energy to the installation, facilitating the evolution and growth of Project X. The project is centered at Ground Control, a research hub and interactive museum from which satellites - small, mobile performance units - radiate around the grounds and offer attendees a chance to take part in the project; their contributions are then brought back to be displayed at Ground Control.

Could be interesting...

I know there are more important matters to complain about than the weather, but...

I’m not specifically saying that Seattle weather is particularly bad this August, but…

I flipped my Sports Illustrated golf calendar at work over to September in prep for next Tuesday. The photo for the month is the 5th hole of the links course at Royal Portrush in Northern Ireland. It’s a beautiful green on the edge of the cliffs, the rough ocean waters behind it and a wall of clouds in the sky. No blue sky anywhere. Just grey.

Then I looked out my office window.

The similarity of my view of Seattle was uncanny.

A wall of clouds in the sky hanging over Lake Union.

August is supposed to be the good month. It's not suppossed to look like this...It's bad enough we get this crap all fall/winter/spring...


I don’t want to look at that picture for the whole month of September. At least next month I will be able to look at a sunny picture of a course in North Carolina.

Getting Lost

[Photo from Painted Snake in a Painted Chair, Talking Band Theatre, La Mama Theatre 2003]

Music is a very important, integral part of the work—we view it as one of the “voices”, including the visual imagery, text, etc. A number of members in the company have musical backgrounds, particularly Ellen and I. She studied flute, piano, and composition. I play clarinet. The music is played live by the performers. From the beginning the company was exploring poetry. We got right away into the music of language, and were really interested in the crossover between language and music. Music is part of the texture of the piece.

I’m interested in that bridge between science and arts…there was a time when the science and arts did not have a separation. Galileo and Kepler both wrote about music as well as science. It was all seen as part of the pursuit of natural laws.

(From my interview with Paul Zimet, Talking Band Theatre—and formerly worked with Chaikin in the Open Theater)

Okay, so what is “devising” theatre?

Or physical theater, aka ensemble-based work or shall we say, experimental theatre?

How does someone like Mary Zimmerman make Metamorphoses or Anne Bogart make bobrauschenbergamerica? How does Ping Chong create Blind Ness, or Moises Kaufman make The Laramie Project?

Here's some rudimentary thoughts on the subject.

A lot of people have been asking about my show in the fall, 7 MINUTES TO MIDNIGHT, and I always stumble slightly when I describe the process behind it…It’s a show about the Doomsday Clock, I say…

"The what?"

It’s an arbitrary clock created by a group of atomic scientists in 1947 to gauge how close the world is to blowing itself up with atomic bombs (aka Doomsday). Every year they meet deciding how many minutes closer or further we are from annihilation. It was set at 7 minutes to midnight in 1947 and has moved several times since then. Right now we’re at 5 minutes to midnight.

It's also about the Nevada testing site, which I used to drive past many times a year when I drove from Vegas to Reno...And what the desert literally and figuratively means...


"But what’s it about?"

It’s about scientists responsibility to mankind…or about how one person’s action’s affect the world…

"No, what’s the story?"

Ah, see the linear story does not quite exist yet…There is a story there, of scientists building a bomb, winning a war, realizing what they’ve done when the bomb is dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the government lying to the American people, the Cold War, etc. That's the literal linear history that can be explored.

There is also embedded in our show the story of Kronos (or Saturn) who devours his children for fear of being usurped.

Perhaps you know the infamous Goya painting?

I don’t know why, I just think this idea/image is pertinent.

There are also some folk/country songs and songs of the era of the late 1940s.

None of it may connect to each other. At least, overtly.

This show may be like a pastiche--mixing of performance styles.

But the truth is, I'm not sure what the show will actually become. We have yet to start building it. Unlike plays written solely by me, I have no pre-conceived or detailed notion of how the end product will look. I have some ideas, of course, but nothing fixed. The core members of the ensemble are still doing research. We’re still talking about the ideas we want to explore. We haven’t even start playing in the rehearsal room to create the characters.

But let’s back up a bit.

The traditional process of making a play (ie playwriting) usually begins with a solitary playwright, sitting alone at his/her desk, writing down the basic plot and characters. He/she describes the setting, time and place, writes the action and dialogue. This can take anywhere from a few weeks to a few years. Then the script is rewritten again and again before getting a reading or a staged reading and then a production. Sometimes it goes straight from initial draft to opening night, but that’s rare. In essence, the script is handed off to a director and actors after the playwright has been grappling with it for whatever length of time. In any original production, though, usually the playwright is still working with that director and actor to polish and perfect the script as much as possible before that first time the audience experiences it.

This type of process is primarily text-centered. The script and the words on the page became the most important element.

Most of my plays have been written this way, including my latest, THE ALBATROSS, which is very traditional playwriting with a linear storyline. The most anti-traditional play I've written, BURNING BOTTICELLI, is more epic in form and non-linear and tosses around a lot of ideas, but it was also built primarily by me at my desk--though rewritten extensively with the NYC cast I had at the time.

In “devising”, the script is created primarily in rehearsal. The script consists of not just the spoken word, which is important, but also physical movements, songs, images, and/or video. In this case, the body can be text. The focus is more on the actor/audience relationships. It can be experimental because the main idea behind this kind of theater is to question the idea of theater—to ask why this structure, why this form, why these words, what happens when we do this, etc?

The idea for the play can begin with one person, such as the “conceiver” or director (suck as Anne Bogart or Mary Zimmerman), or it can be a joint project initiated by a group (such as the Open Theater or Theatre de Complicite). But usually, there is someone who takes some form of lead, even in the most autonomous working ensemble. Someone has to start making decisions of what to leave in and take out before performing for an audience.

In my case, the central ideas and questions are coming from me and ultimately will be shaped by my lens. But I will not be writing this play alone like I usually do, which is quite welcome. Instead, I bring in these thoughts, images, props, songs, text, whatever and mix it up, like making a stew.

We play. In the playing we create. Just like kids playing in a sandbox, really.

When I first met with my core ensemble, I laid out a very simple map in these terms, that our process would have three phases:

Phase 1: Collecting (Research, questions, brainstorming)
Phase 2: Testing
Phase 3: Shaping

We begin with questions and these questions will lead us to gathering notes, text, images, sounds, music, and whatever else might stimulate our imaginations and thoughts centered around those questions.

In the rehearsal room, we take what we have learned and share with the rest of the ensemble. We play with them dramatically, with exercises, with character studies, improvising and trying out some of our ideas.

In the shaping phase, we start pulling the show together and making the difficult decisions about what we are trying to say or do with the audience. This could also be called the “whittling away” phase.

In some respects, this process is not so dissimilar from traditional theater. It's pretty evident that each playwright has their own distinctive process (Albee writes a play vastly different than Churchill). So then its also clear that each "devisor" of theatre has their own process, as well.

But it's writing. As a group. Collaboratively. Writing theatre. Sometimes writing "on your feet", sometimes collecting text, sometimes originating text.

Now, those three phases makes it all sound very systematic, but the truth is, it won’t be. These phases will all blend into each other. We’ll still be gathering notes in the testing phase, still be testing some things in the shaping phase, etc. And as with charting any course via any roadmap, there will be detours and side roads, distractions and perhaps a flat tire. We will lose our way. There will be times when we will be speeding right along at 65 mph and other times when its only 15 mph. It is the nature of the process.

But as Chaikin says:

We must be able to go somewhere else—where, we don’t know. The danger here is that we will get lost…Plan on it. Count on it.

I can’t go on, I must go on, I’ll go on

Outside the weather is crappy yet again.

I have to continually remind myself that there are regions in this world where summer is not over in mid-August…That the sun shines more than ten times a year…

It’s just not here in Seattle.

I’m feeling glum today for many reasons. Maybe one reason is that I'm still reading that biography on Samuel Beckett, The Last Modernist by Anthony Cronin. As biographies go, it's not bad, certainly not as exhaustive as Damned to Fame.

Beckett's outlook on life is quintessentially Irish. It is hope amidst suffering, optimistic but cynical…Beckett is a man who, when a friend said about a sunny day, “Isn’t it a beautiful day? Makes one glad to be alive…”, Beckett replied with...

“Well, I wouldn’t go so far as to say that…”

But the real reason is I just found out that someone at work has been diagnosed with cancer.

But as Erin (maybe now going as Eloise), one of my students at BCC so elegantly said…

“F**k cancer!”


Life is suffering, as the buddhists say, but life is worth living.

We can't go on, we must go on, we go on.

Thinking about the ensemble

What does it mean to create an ensemble?

The word “ensemble” gets tossed around a lot these days, whether its theater, dance, music, the circus, vaudeville, or whatever…It’s a word that is watered down, misconstrued, misused and abused to a point where you think just about anyone and everyone is making an ensemble or creating ensemble-based pieces.

To confuse matters, many theater companies even have that word in their name. I worked at Ensemble Studio Theater in New York City …in fact, just google that word and you might find a lot of theaters calling themselves “ensemble” this or “ensemble” that…It seems anyone can lay claim to it.

Well, yes, but aren’t they an ensemble? I mean, if I cast a production of Hamlet, aren’t all those actors working together in a collaborative way? Haven’t they formed as a group to work harmoniously together to create a work of art?

Sure, but…

Okay, etymologically, it’s just French for “the same together” and then somewhere around a hundred years ago it started being used for musical groups and then became an adjective to describe a particular way of being—as in ensemble acting, defined by merriam-webster as “emphasizing the roles of all performers as a whole rather than a star performance”.

Ah, there might lie the difference…between ensemble as a group of artists to a way of working...

As a director casting Hamlet, I’m going to want a specific Hamlet for my vision of that well-defined play—this is why we go see Ralph Fiennes or Liev Schreiber or Kevin Kline’s Hamlet. It is a star vehicle. Sure, the rest of the actors are just as important and there have been some great ensemble-based Shakespeare pieces (ala Peter Brook) but mostly, that is a play about that central character with others revolving around him. Many plays are like that. This is a simplistic way of looking at it, but bear with me for the illustration of the point.

I’ve been re-reading my Joseph Chaikin book THE PRESENCE OF THE ACTOR and he understands the ensemble to have two principles:

“The first is empathy: one actor, instead of necessarily competing with another, instead of trying to take attention away from him would instead support the other…There comes a point when you no longer know exactly which actor is in support and which actor initiated the action; they are simply together.

“The other has to do with rhythm, with dynamics, and with a kind of sensitivity which could be rhythmically self-expressed…”

He then goes on to talk about a singular person’s inner rhythm, going on all the time, which adds a certain energy to the room and sometimes these rhythms are in battle with each other, contrary to what is being said. It’s this dynamic and idea of rhythms which fueled much of Chaikin’s work with the Open Theater.

It’s also important to note that many ensemble-based works were focused on physical theatre, rather than text-based theater. The truth is, the elements of theatre become an ensemble, working as a harmonious whole—text, movement, music, design—all having equal importance. It creates a multi-layered experience.

The problem I’ve seen with some ensembles, especially as they form theater companies is a limited view of the ensemble. They see only the acting ensemble as an ensemble, rather than viewing the director, playwright, designers, dramaturg, and stage manager as integral parts of the collaborative process.

One can even extend the idea of the ensemble to include the audience as well as the theatre-makers (as Grotowski did…).

Few ever do this.

The reason is simple: we like the comfort of the fourth wall. It protects us and keeps us safe.

Chaikin also said that we should never be too comfortable as we make our art, always pushing ourselves…This is why he concocted so many exercises during rehearsals, exercises that he used and discarded like paper plates.

Constantly forcing yourself out of the comfort zone and creating new ways of surprise is one reason why few people actually make ensembles and/or do physical-based theatre work. The work requires more time and energy and we live in a country that is very much about “get it up fast” and is concentrated on the end product of the opening night performance. Also, simply making traditional theater is hard enough as it is, why add to to it?

Ensemble-based work is usually more focused on the process, the experiential aspects of theatre-making, not the end product. Most producers are not down with that, which is why you don’t see it much in regional theaters like at Seattle Rep. Sure, you will get the rare mainstream success like Metamorphosis on Broadway, but this is the exception to the rule. Ensemble-making usually happens in alternative circles, those with little or no money (like the downtown or lower east side of NYC). The positive is that these forms of theatre-making are very conducive to those alternative groups who are usually the disempowered ones in the economic/social spheres of the city.

But I think I’ll write more later in this blog about my thoughts on physical theater (what Joane Schirle of Dell’Arte calls “total theatre”) and “devising” theater, another catch-all phrase getting close to distortion by its usage, since there are so many different types of companies and methodologies behind devising (Mary Zimmerman, Ann Bogart, Ping Chong, Richard Foreman, Theatre de Complicite, Soujourner, etc.).

As I delve into the beginnings of building my ensemble for 7 MINUTES TO MIDNIGHT and the many thoughts I have about what theatre is for me, what we’re making and why…It is no surprise that I am filled with a little bit of fear of what lies ahead, but only in the sense of adventure…as if I’m getting into my car and heading across country without any map, just knowing the general direction.

Whitman--not just a candy!

I just really dig these ads from Americans for the Arts.

Carla Bruni - Those Dancing Days

A little music for Monday. We may use this song for the show in the fall.

Shadow of the Volcano

I was browsing through old files in my computer (because I should be writing but instead of dilly-dallying on Facebook, I just started doing other things) and came across this first draft of the 10 page play originally written for the NPA Double-shot festival. It's not bad, but it's not quite great, either. I shelved the whole thing for a much better, more dramatic premise about two sisters who haven't spoken to each other in years. The lesson here, though, is clear to me--although I love some of this dialogue, this play is 10 minutes of absent conflict. Now, does it work, or not?

You decide.


LIGHTS UP on a bare stage. JANE wears a sleek black business suit, holds her BlackBerry and addresses the audience.

JANE
It was when I was driving somewhere out of Tacoma, on my way to see her, that I thought about it...

JO ENTERS, wears jeans, boots and plaid shirt.

JO
I bought a new tent.
JANE
How does one write a story for the modern age?
JO
I finally went to that place I heard about. It’s called REI.
JANE
In a world of Facebook and Myspace and everyone watching Youtube?
JO
Waterproof.
JANE
I can’t ever decide which email to check first. I have four.
JO
Up here a waterproof tent is important.
JANE
I can spend hours browsing friends on Facebook.
JO
I get tired of sleeping under the stars when I camp.
JANE
Sometimes at night I reach out and caress my Blackberry, just to make sure its still there.
JO
Although it’s nice to be flat on my back in the grass, pretend to reach up and touch those stars, so far away and twinkling like lost diamonds planted in a black sea.

JANE and JO look at each other.

JO
Hi.
JANE
Hello.
JO
I’m Jo.
JANE
Jane.
JO
Nice outfit.
JANE
Oh, thank you. You like it?
JO
I just said.
JANE
I know but you...
JO
You think I’m lying?
JANE
No, I just think.
JO
What?
JANE
You’re being nice.
JO
What’dya mean?
JANE
Everyone here is always being nice. But you don’t really know...
JO
Yeah?
JANE
Where people stand. Sometimes. They’re nice, but...uncertain.
JO
Life is filled with uncertainty.
JANE
I’m Jane.
JO
You said. You’re not from around here.
JANE
The paper sent me up here to....
JO
You’re from L.A.?
JANE
Yeah.
JO
You wanna go camping with me?
JANE
Do I...?
JO
Go camping.
JANE
I don’t understand.
JO
Camping. It’s when you pitch a tent and sleep in the woods.
JANE
Oh, no, I know, but...Why would you...?
JO
I’m just asking.
JANE
I don’t think so, no.
JO
I get tired of going out by myself.
JANE
I don’t...I’ve never camped.
JO
Never?
JANE
No.
JO
In your entire life? Not even as a kid?
JANE
I grew up in Orange County.
JO
Shame. I got me a new tent.
JANE
The paper sent me up here...They think...You’re a good article.
JO
Oh, yeah. That. What’s the big deal?
JANE
You’re like a pioneer.
JO
Ah, I’m just getting by.
JANE
You’re a woman. You’ve lived an entire life here in the woods, on your own, no electricity, no plumbing, no tv, computer, internet or even a phone to--
JO
What’s the internet? That like the world wide webby?
JANE
You’ve experienced none of the trappings of a modern age.
JO
I have a dog.
JANE
That’s not really what I’m...
JO
C’mon. Go camping with me.
JANE
Why?
JO
I gotta show ya something. It’s beautiful.
JANE
But I didn’t bring anything.
JO
You’ll be okay. Just come.
JANE
No, I don’t think...
JO
You want your story. By sunrise, I promise you, you’ll get it.

JANE turns to the audience.

JANE
So we went camping!

They sit around campfire. JANE tries to warm herself up while she keeps checking her BlackBerry

JO
Cold?
JANE
A little.
JO
Get closer to the fire.
JANE
I don’t understand...It doesn’t do this...
JO
What is that thing?
JANE
It’s my BlackBerry and it’s not working...I’ve never been anywhere that my Blackberry wasn’t working. How do I...?
JO
Shhh. Quiet. You’ll wake the bears.
JANE
The bears?
JO
They sometimes smell the food, come sniffing about.
JANE
I don’t know that I can sleep out here with bears and god knows what other kinds of--
JO
Quiet.
JANE
I can’t...what?
JO
Listen.
JANE
What?
JO
Do you hear that?

Beat. Jane listens.

JANE
I don’t hear anything.
JO
Nice, huh?
JANE
Why do you do this? Live up here. Like this?
JO
Why do you do it?
JANE
What do you mean?
JO
Live down there?
JANE
What do you mean?
JO
You go about your business, all rushing about, moving your papers and doing your numbers and having your fancy dinners, but why? Why do you do it?
JANE
To feed my kids.
JO
You got kids?
JANE
Yes, two, but...
JO
I never had kids.
JANE
I’m sorry.
JO
Doesn’t your husband work?
JANE
I’m divorced.
JO
Oh. Sorry.
JANE
Nothing to be sorry about there.
JO
I never got married. Never saw the sense in it.
JANE
I don’t blame you.
JO
Rather have me a good dog then a good man any day. Least you know a good dog will come back to you. Usually.
JANE
Maybe I should get a dog.
JO
So why do you live in L.A.?
JANE
I like it there.
JO
No one likes L.A.
JANE
It has a certain craziness that appeals to my sensibilities.
JO
Crazy is one way of puttin’ it.
JANE
You live up here like a hermit, a throwback to the 1800s, like its still the wild west and pioneer days and you’re calling me crazy?
JO
I live a simple life.
JANE
You’re behind the times. People don’t live like this anymore. We have choices. We have tools and technology to make our lives easier.
JO
Does it?
JANE
What?
JO
Make your life easier?
JANE
We have...women have progressed now. We run corporations. We own businesses. We play with the big boys. It’s just...we live in modern times.
JO
Are you happy?
JANE
I’m not talking about happiness. I’m talking about progress.
JO
Ain’t they the same thing?
JANE
Not to me.
JO
You know what makes me happy? Waking up to the sunrise over that mountain. It’s nice after a good night of sleep. Why don’t you try the new tent.

JANE addresses audience.

JANE
And we slept. The next morning, I awoke to the most beautiful sunrise. The misty air had given way to a clear sky with only a few scattered clouds. A pinkish orange glow hovered over a huge mountain. Like Mt. Olympus of the Greek golden age. Jo was already awake.
JO
The air gets so thick these mornings. Like its afraid to move. Like time is standing still. You know that mountain up there, it’s really a volcano. Not active, yet. Any minute it could blow, end our world. It’s a nice reminder.
JANE
I think I understand. Why you wanted me to go camping.
JO
I wanted to try out my new tent. It’s good, isn’t it?
JANE
Very.
JO
Waterproof. You kept reaching out for this last night.

JO hands JANE her Blackberry.

JANE
Is there a lake around here?
JO
Oh, yeah. We got several.
JANE
Maybe we could see if this floats.
JO
Do some fishing, too.
JANE
Oh, that’s not...
JO
Let me guess...never done any fishing.
JANE
Nope.
JO
Well, today is a good day to start.
JANE
And that’s how I lost my Blackberry in a lake and learned how to fish on the same day. I didn’t catch any fish. But I did catch a good story.
JO
At night I think about how the day will come when I won’t be able to reach out to those stars in the black sea anymore. I hope someone else might do it for me.

JO reaches up to the sky. LIGHTS OUT.

Puppet Séance, Magic Tricks, Dead Horses & Silent Women in Lingerie wearing Cowboy Hats…

Okay, so many friends have been intrigued by the experimental show we saw in NYC a few weeks ago. I will comment briefly on it, as it is still a work-in-progress by Active Eye Theater and I don't want to give any spoilers.

And its a little hard to explain fully, anyway.

 

But first, my mini-review of Sam Shepard's new play KICKING A DEAD HORSE which we saw at The Public Theater, starring Stephen Rea.

The more I think about this new work from the cowboy poet who brought us BURIED CHILD and TRUE WEST (truly two of the greatest American plays ever written), the more I love it. For the past decade, Shepard has been making a good living popping up acting in movies and occasionally writing stuff like THE LATE HENRY MOSS    and GOD OF HELL (not altogether brilliant and mostly recycled motifs from earlier works). But in KICKING A DEAD HORSE, it feels like Shepard has turned a corner, has taken the idea of the existentialist cowboy to the extreme and brought us a clown/vaudeville show in the desert, a one-act that Beckett would grin and nod approvingly at.

The plot is fairly straightforward. Hobart is a successful art dealer who was able to make a fortune by scouring the west and buying old Remington paintings from saloons, selling them to Manhattan- ites. He's originally from the badlands, but has spent decades in NYC and has lost his grasp on "authenticity" and pines for his youth, and his old horse. When the lights come up, we find Hobart in the middle of the prairie, digging a large grave, his old horse lying sideways nearby. As he talks to us, and himself, he tries to get the horse into the grave because he can't "just leave him". But the horse is stubborn and doesn't want to go (or maybe doesn't want to go in by himself). Night falls. It rains. Hobart tries to put up a tent which never stays up. The sun comes up again and finally, Hobart manages to get that horse in the grave, but the consequences of that are pretty grim.

And yes, as the title suggest, he really does kick the dead horse.

More than once.

It's actually pretty cool--I've never seen that on stage before...

No conversation about the play can begin without commenting on Rea's performance. It's basically a one-man show (with the exception of a young woman in a nightgown briefly appearing out of the grave with his cowboy hat on while he sings "I'm a rambler"…who is this woman? Is she a lost love? The hat? His wife at a young age? We never really know…). There is a circus hall style to the play and to his performance, and he shifts from that style to naturalism with ease and grace. And he's really funny without losing the gravity of the situation.

What I love about the play is its simplicity (I'm a big fan of simplicity, if you couldn't tell by my endless rants about it in these here blogs). It feels like Shepard's grown aware of the fact he's getting old and is staring down at a beckoning grave, much like Hobarth. And beyond just this personal reflections on the past and present, this search for authenticity in one's soul and actions, there is also the political ideals of the "western world" and how we relate to others.

To sum up, its one of those plays that haunts you for a while, one that can't be tightly wrapped up like a birthday present. Truths that linger…

 

On the other end of the spectrum of simplicity was the puppet play we saw in a small rehearsal room at the Women's Project, directed Jyana Brown and presented by the company members of Active Eye Theater.

 

Like I said, this is still in workshop stages, so I don't want to divulge too much other than the fact that what they're doing is totally brilliant.

No, really. And those that know me know I don't toss that around lightly…
 

Okay, but the fun thing, before I say anything about the show, is that one of the theater members, Andrew Grusetskie, was in my early Off-off-Broadway production of LOVE'S LABORS WON OR BENVOLIO IS ALIVE AND WELL AND LIVING IN THE BAHAMAS at Vital Theater. I remember saying goodbye to him at a friend's apartment when he left for school in London and hadn't seen him since. Which, I mean, good for him, but I really liked his work in my play and would've used him in many, many other things if I could've…And then there he was in this show…!
 

Anyway, without giving too much away, they adapted an ancient puppet play from Japan (was it 15^th century?). It's set during a time when many love-suicides were happening. The show is set up as a play within a play and as we watch them "rehearse" very strange things start to happen. Props fall off the desk, off the walls; actors do strange things completely unawares. There are some magic tricks and illusions and eventually the actors become "possessed" by the spirits of these characters (or are they spirits of real love-suicides?) and end being manipulated as if they were puppets. And then at the end there is a séance.
 

So, um, like I said, it's a little hard to describe. But very, very cool. And quite inspiring, especially for the show I'm working on in the fall.
 

That's what I love about going to see theater—when its brilliant, that is—it completely inspires you and reminds you, "That's the kind of stuff I want to see on stage! That's what I want to write/direct/produce!"
 

What the world needs is more Bob

I'm completely stoked to learn that a new Bob Dylan Bootleg CD, "Tell-Tale Signs" is coming out later this year, on October 7^th.

Yes, I have already pre-ordered it.

It includes a lot of different versions of songs I already have, but also new unrecorded songs, as well.
 

I'm salivating just thinking about it.
 

Go here for a video treat of "Ring them Bells" and a USA Today feature.

Smarty Pants

My PhD candidate wife is so darn smart...She is a PAGE fellow at the National Conference, which will be held later this year at U.S.C. in L.A.

Only, like 7% of those who apply, get it...

What is a PAGE fellow, you say?

The PAGE Institute is held annually at the Imagining America National Conference

What is "Publicly Active Graduate Education"? How does our academic scholarship activate our civic engagement, and vice versa? When theory and practice unite in community-based projects led by graduate students, what are the implications—for graduate students, for the communities involved, and for graduate education?

Every year, Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life invites graduate students in the arts, humanities, and design with a demonstrated interest in public engagement to apply to be PAGE (Publicly Active Graduate Education) Fellows at Imagining America’s national conference.

Report on NYC coming soon!

(We saw two shows, one experimental and the other the new Sam Shepard piece Kicking a Dead Horse)