What I'm Reading: Juliet, Naked by Nick Hornby and some August Wilson

After the dense reading of Pittsburgh in Stages by Lynn Conner, I picked up Nick Hornby’s Juliet, Naked.  A fun, witty story well-told by one of my favorite writers (author of About a Boy and High Fidelity) was well needed.  

This is the kind of book you want to bring with you on vacation so you can spend an hour or two basking in the sun of Mexico and be entertained.  The last book of his I read, A Long Way Down, was over four years ago, and while I enjoyed that book, I think this was was more my speed.  

The main storyline is about a reclusive American singer-songwriter named Tucker who created one of the greatest breakup albums of all time (or at least comparable to Tangled Up in Blue).  After a believed epiphany in a Minneapolis bathroom, he disappeared for 29 years.  There is much heated internet discussion on his whereabouts, especially by one of the other main characters who lives in a northern town in the U.K. with his girlfriend of 15 years.  He gives a review of a new album, a release of raw acoustic versions of Tucker's songs, which causes his girlfriend to openly disagree with him and she ends up in contact with the real Tucker.

What I love about Hornby's characters, other than the sense of humor that is woven throughout all his scenarios and the funny dialogue, is that his characters are so human.  They have flaws.  And not just pick-your-nose flaws.  They're just trying to get by and finding hope in even the smallest things of life.  Like us.  Even the singer-songwriter who is seen as a music "god" by his fans is really just an ordinary dad who is getting old and constantly fails at relationships.  

Next up on my reading list are some more August Wilson plays.  I just finished reading Seven Guitars again (love that play) and am now going to read Radio Golf, King Hedley II and Jitney.  I’m hoping to just work my way through the cycle.  These plays inform each other in such wonderful ways (and now I get their Pittsburgh references since all but one are set in the Hill District).

Tips for the auditioning actors

Are you wondering how playwrights are trying to help actors be brilliant in their texts?  

We are, you know.  We do love actors and want them to rock with our words.  And good playwrights know how to write for actors.  But you have to know where to look for these hints.  That's why I'm excited about doing a guest blog over at Detta's Audition Site.

So what are you waiting for?  Click the link below and check it out.

5 Tips for the Auditioning Actor (from a playwright)

I speak yinz now (well, not really...)

Just in case you missed the mention of it in my last post, I’m now blogging about my new adventures in the steel city (aka Pittsburgh).

Thing is, it's not really a “steel city” anymore.  In fact, it’s one of the most livable cities in the U.S., according to Forbes magazine.

Pittsburgh is…well, read the blog and find out.

What I'm reading: Out of this Furnace & Pittsburgh in Stages

This past couple of weeks has been like “History Month” for me as far as reading goes. 

As some of you might already know, I moved to Pittsburgh from Seattle just over a month ago.  While it was sad to say goodbye to some of the amazing and talented people we met in the pacific northwest, it is nice to be back on the east coast, and a little bit closer to family.

(I've never lived in Pittsburgh before, or any place like it so now I'm going to chronicle that newcomer experience in a new blog called “I Speak Yinz Now”.  Check it out).

Having no knowledge or lay of the land is quite disorienting and so I’ve started reading some books that might help me get my bearing.  

First up, I read Thomas Bell’s book Out of this Furnace, which chronicles three different generations of immigrants who come to Braddock and end up working in the steel mills.  (Braddock is only a couple of miles from Pittsburgh proper and literally only a few miles from where I'm living now). Although the prose isn’t poetic and at times the reading can be dry and slow-going, this book does give you a feel for what it was like to come to this area a hundred years ago and try to survive.

What's also interesting is that some of the characters live in Homestead, just across the river, where there used to be a ton of steel mills.  Now there is the Waterfront, home to a huge shopping center which has all your standard stores like the Gap, Target, etc.  Some of the towering smoke stacks are still there, casting their shadows over the parking lots.

By the way, Braddock is now the focus of some infamous, and inspiring Levi’s commercials—check it out.

The other educational and helpful book I’ve read lately is Pittsburgh in Stages by Lynn Conner.  This takes the past hundred years and looks at theater and performances from the early days of Fort Pitt, to the burlesque shows of the 1920s on up to the more legit stages like the birth of the Pittsburgh Playhouse and the Pittsburgh Public Theater.  

Although at some points it definitely reads like a history book, it's chock full of great stories about theatre luminaries like Eleanora Duse and Lilly Langtry, as well as focusing on some of the well-known Pittsburghers, like renowned playwright August Wilson.

It’s essential reading for anyone wanting to know the theatrical context of this region.  

Writing the solo show, pt.5: Live the story

One of my pet peeves with monodramas is when the performer tells me a story in the past tense. 

If I’m sitting in the audience in any play and I hear an actor say “I remember when…” it makes me cringe. 

We must not forget one of the qualities which makes theatre unique:

Theatre is present tense.

We don’t want you to “tell a story”. 

We want to see you live through a story in front of our eyes.

Oedipus Rex is not about what happened (even if it is set in Greek times).  As the audience, we watch the inevitable doom happen to Oedipus before our eyes.  We witness it.  It is in the witnessing of the events that we gain catharsis, or knowledge, or just sheer pleasure (if watching a guy gauge his eyes out is your kind of thing...I'm not judging.).

However, having said that, you are likely to write part of your solo show in the past tense, especially as you initially write things down.  That’s okay.  Most of the stuff I’ve been writing has been a lot of memories and stories in the past tense.  There are ways to dramatize it, put it in the present moment.  After I get all of the raw material down, then I’ll start to work on that.

Ultimately you don't want to create a piece of literature.  You want a performance.  You can only do one  thing a time, though.  First, write some text, then build a performance out of that.  

Live the story, don't tell the story.  

Writing the solo show, pt. 4: Finding your metaphor

I have this thing when I write.  I also use it when I direct a show, as well.  I try to find the metaphor.  This is something I picked up from reading that wonderful directing book by William Ball, I admit it.

So I'm developing my metaphor for my solo show and all I can do is think about this story.  Ideally, a metaphor should be one sentence (ie American Buffalo is boys playing king of the hill), so bear with me, as this story is a little long:

I’m eleven years old and home alone.  We live in two-story house in Reno, Nevada.  I have recently seen the movie Raiders of the Lost Ark at the movie theater, probably for the tenth time.  

Inspired and wanting to be Indiana Jones, I run around the house with a short rope, pretending it’s a whip and I use it to ward off the Nazis. 

The house we live in has a great big foyer and the staircase on the first floor juts out a bit as the stairs run up alongside a landing with a railing on the second floor.  I decide its time to use the whip to swing across a great chasm of death, as Indy does in the movie.  I tie the rope to the upstairs railing.  My thought is to swing from the steps on the stairwell, my body flying out above the foyer, across the chasm, landing safely on top of the railing on the first level where the staircase juts out.  

I hear the trumpets of the Raiders theme in my head and I swing.  I soar through the air, hands holding tight to the rope, landing easily on the railing, carefully balancing.  I swing back again and smirk to myself, thinking, “I am Indiana Jones!”. 

So I do it again. 

Only this time, the rope doesn’t hold.

My body is suddenly adrift, my mind unsure of what is actually happening, and I fall backwards, crashing with a thud on the front hallway tile.  The wind is knocked out of me so hard I can’t breathe.  I’m lucky I my head isn’t cracked open, but as I wheeze and gasp for air, I think I’m going to die and my mom is going to walk in the front door of our house, see her dead son and wonder what the hell happened. 

Finally, I catch my breath.  I’m able to stand up.  Everything seems fine, nothing broken.  

I look at the rope on the floor which seems like a dead snake.

I realize for the first time, “I am not Indiana Jones”.

The idea is that we all have dreams, childhood dreams perhaps, but then reality brings us back down to earth.  Literally, in my case.

We can’t always do the things we want to do.  We can’t always be the things we want to be.  That’s just life.  It’s a hard lesson to learn.

Don’t get me wrong.  I believe in dreaming big dreams.  I believe in following your goals.  As Randy Pausch said in his last lecture, “brick walls are there to see how badly you want something”.  I do believe that.  But Randy, who wanted to be an astronaut, never got to be an astronaut.  He got close—he rode the “vomit comet” and felt what it was like to be in zero gravity, which was what he really wanted, but he never got to be an astronaut.

What I’m talking about is the difference between perception and reality.  I can't magically become six feet tall.  I can't run a 4 minute mile.  I can’t reverse the clock, pretend like I'm 25 years old.    

I can’t change the weather, only dress for it.

My solo show is about the fantasy of the "Real Man" and the reality of what it means to be a man.  Our perception and reality don't always coincide. 

Here are the major questions behind my metaphor:

What does it mean to be a real man?  When and how do we conceptualize this idea of real men and how does it affect us for the rest of our lives?

Indiana Jones exemplifies manliness.  As a boy I looked up to him because he was intelligent, brave, strong, a good fighter, good with the women, comfortable in a jungle or in the classroom, and fought for what he believed in.  He was one of the good guys.  

And let’s face facts, he looked cool, with that hat and leather jacket.  And the whip.  (and yes, I do have a whip even now…) 

There are many other images and faces of “real men”.  Think about Superman and Clark Kent.  Think about the Dark Knight.  Think about actors like Clint Eastwood, Cary Grant, Gary Cooper, Jack Nicholson, George Clooney, Clive Owen.  We carry around these ideas of what “manhood” looks like…that’s what I want to explore. 

 

More often than not, what we think is manly really turns out to be something else.  We find out we are something else.  

Maybe more than what we thought. 

Writing the solo show pt. 3: Let's get physical

In 1916, a writer of the Evening Sun in New York by the name of Don Marquis, created a fictional poet by the name of Archy. He also happened to be a cockroach with the soul of a human. From this downtrodden, underbelly view of the world, Archy shows how he sees life, and death and religion, and we meet his friend, Mehitable, an alley cat who is the re-incarnation of Cleopatra.

Archy types one letter at a time, without punctuation or much grammar, yet is quite lucid and poetical (and this pre-dates e.e. cummings, by the way).

Take this excerpt from the most famous poem, where Pete the Parrot talks about Shakespeare, the poor mutt, who he knew well:

money money says bill what the hell
is money what i want is to be
a poet not a business man

these damned cheap shows
i turn out to keep the
theatre running break my heart

slap stick comedies and

blood and thunder tragedies
and melodramas say i wonder

if that boy heard you order

another bottle Frankie
the only compensation is that i get

a chance now and then
to stick in a little poetry

when nobody is looking

but hells bells that isn t

what i want to do
i want to write sonnets and
songs and spenserian stanzas
and i might have done it too
if i hadn t got
into this frightful show game

business business business

grind grind grind

what a life for a man

that might have been a poet

Last post I mentioned one should do some research—read some solo shows or go see them. Friday night I got the chance to see Gale McNeeley perform his solo show Archy & Mehitabel. Complete with songs and recitations, characters from the poems and stories came to life due to Gale’s physicality and multiple voices.

Which brings me to my next thing to think about when writing a solo show, or rather, the thing I’m thinking about now.

 And that’s to remember that theatre is a physical activity.

Playwrights often forget this, which is why we see a lot of “talking heads” shows or plays that feel more like TV (which is also very aurally dependent as opposed to film which relies heavily on images).

Even though the above excerpt is a rich text-driven piece of poetry, Gale is able to inhabit multiple characters through his voice, body, and movements. We see him do Archy, by use of a 1920s style hat, and then launch into being Pete the Parrot, a drunken Will Shakespeare, a bloated Ben Johnson, and also Frankie Beaumont (some random bar patron, I assume).

Gale has extensive training in dell’arte and European clowning, which means he understands how a simple gesture, a slight variation in stance can create character and move a story along. Playwrights forget that. They rely too heavily on the words. Words are only part of the story. We’re not building a radio show. It’s live theatre.

Here’s a trick to think about when developing your monologues. Not all of us have dell’arte or clown training (I certainly don’t). You can still think of physicality in the simplest terms by thinking about activities that can be done. What can your character be doing that might coincide with what’s going on in the scene?

For instance:
a pregnant mom talking about her anxieties of being a new mother might be knitting baby socks
a musician changing strings on a guitar.
a man who just got his heart broken might be talking about his ex-girlfriend while he systematically rips up love letters

You don’t always necessarily need some kind of physical activity. There are times when the text needs to be front and center with little movement at all. But in the early stages of writing, it helps to remember and think about the physical three-dimensional space these characters will inhabit.