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Dispatch from Humana: Third Eye Blind

In which bliss happens -- in a gay bar -- risks are taken, and a corsage is made of condoms.

Monday, March 26, 1:48 p.m.

My third eye just imploded. I am definitely in some zone of bliss. I just saw Batch: An American Bachelor/ette Party Spectacle.

New Paradise Laboratories is a group from Philly that's been working together for ten years and for two years on this piece. Actors Theatre commissioned playwright Alice Tuan to work with director Whit MacLaughlin and his company on Batch, which is the second in a series on rites of passage and follows Prom, a piece they developed with Minneapolis Children's Theatre.

Batch is performed at The Connection, a gay bar in Louisville. The stage is a raised platform with seats on three sides and four video screens placed on the back wall and behind the seats. It's in a back room, so you walk through the empty drag-show spaces and past bars, between pillars and down a hallway: it's a little eerie. Coming into the back room, you can buy a drink at the bar and find a seat either down on the floor around the stage or at tables which are a few steps higher.

On the screens there's a man walking, looking at you. His image moves from one screen to the next as he circles the space. Hypnotic music is playing. There are two chairs on the platform, which looks somehow like a boxing ring. Gradually, a woman in a red dress rises from a trapdoor and stands on the platform, turning slowly as she watches the audience. One hand is behind her back with her fingers crossed, the other hand is delicately active. She smiles, or not. It's an extension of the moment of being observed and observing back, stretched to a fascinating abstraction.

One by one, rising smoothly (how do they do that??) through the trapdoor, come her five friends, all in red dresses. Except three of them are men. There's a video camera on a small tripod, which films the action onstage, so you are always watching both the live action and what's happening on the screens. The friends start planning a bachelorette party for the bride-to-be, Betsy Competitive. There's bickering, suggestions for themes (pirates?), and an ugly moment when the maid of honor (the biggest, hairiest guy) realizes she's been demoted.

There's movement. Glorious, precise, trust-filled, risky hurling of bodies in a precarious space that took my breath away. It exhilarated me, and made me so sad: The current trend of cost-cutting, ever-shorter rehearsal time means that many actors are lucky if we have three weeks before tech, so we will rarely experience this kind of rigor and consequent richness of expression. These actors clearly love their work: It's impossibly demanding, and they achieve the impossible. Their articulation is so precise: It's as if they are aware of the molecules in the air that are displaced as they move toward and away from each other.

There's language, too, brilliantly veering from the most banal, dumb stuff we all say when we're choosing a stripper for a pre-wedding blowout, to heightened poetry that captures the stuttering of the mind when that stripper shows up and a line is crossed.

There's fabulousness in every sense of the word: myths explored onscreen and onstage, the american taboo of sexuality sliced, diced and cuisinarted, and I didn't even get to the penises. There's one that squirts, several that get ripped off, and a real one that's tenderly shielded onstage while its image is projected on all four screens. Gender-bending to the nth degree, the actors all have boobies and packages and fluidly switch back and forth between the bridal party and the groomsmen.

The Twizzler outfit did not disappoint, neither did Madame Pompadour in her teal thong, nor a blow job involving a microphone. The condom corsage was a stroke of genius. And the goat-hide-chaps-wearing, sparring-partner-helmeted and -gloved satyr gently rubbing his/her horn up and down the bride's particulars floored me: a beautifully articulated vision of myth, porn and intimacy.

Did I mention it's funny? Funny in that "Oh my God I can't believe they just did that but I'm SO glad they did" kind of way. These guys paint a picture of sex, friendship, intimacy and ritual in America that made me laugh, squirm from the truthfulness of their performance, and hope that maybe, just maybe, if theatre artists are doing work like this, we will some day live in a country that isn't fractured by denial. Where a penis apron can be worn with pride.

This show runs here through April 1st. They will remount it in Philadelphia in September, for two weeks. Don't miss it. And someone has to bring it to DC.

Your next tour ...

... could be a very long one indeed.

An encouraging Uma update

So Uma Nithipalan, for whom you're supposed to have been vandalizing, is out of the ICU.

You remember: The 27-year-old L.A.-based actress (pictured at right, before her hospitalization) collapsed suddenly on Feb. 1 after a brain aneurysm -- far from home, with no health insurance, not long after she said "yes" to a marriage proposal.

Playwright Erik Patterson, who's been chronicling Uma's struggle since that day, emphasizes that moving out of the ICU is a huge thing. Doctors initially expected her to die -- or at best to remain in a vegetative state for life.

Meanwhile theaterbloggers and theaterfolk and just plain people have raised a pile of money to help pay for Uma's medical expenses. (They'll need more, so if the spirit moves you, the link is at the top right on that page.)

I have to say I've found the story of Uma's fight immensely moving -- and the extraordinary response of people who don't even know her even more so.

You can read up on it at Metroblogging LA -- it's an end-of-February post, but it's a lively overview.

Dispatch from Humana: 3 bars, 2 apartments, 1 quesadilla binge

In which our correspondent attends an opening-"night" party that takes in half of Looahville and goes on for half a day.

Tuesday, March 6, 2:23 a.m.

We had a kick-ass opening on Sunday at 2:30pm. The show had been tightening up during previews, and Michael G kept tweaking the tech elements and the moment-to-moment stuff, and on Sunday the whole thing caught fire. It was very exciting.

I don't know what it's like to watch, only what it's like to do, but I've been talking to some of the people who've come to see it, and they seem not only to have really enjoyed the production, but to be genuinely interested in what the play has to say. It is sparking a lot of conversations about the Internet, boys growing up, virtual reality, cybersex, dangerous theatre, and the meaning of truth, for starters.

And, since we opened with a matinee, the opening night party was 12 hours long....and travelled to five different locations. Three bars and two apartments, plus a trip to the Kroger's for supplies for quesadillas: I cooked about a dozen in a hazy, assembly-line fashion. Jen's Kentucky Kesadillas.  Ended up playing darts at Freddie's.

It was such a celebration of the month we've spent together, working on this piece. Everyone here seems so excited about this play and our production, as they are about all the plays in the festival: the actors in the other shows  are coming to see ours even as they get ready to tech or open their own. It's crazy supportive, and so much about the whole festival and the joy of bringing these new plays to the stage.
I like Humana.

-- Jen

P.S. - There's an apprentice whose dream job is to work with Fugazi (she's a sound engineer type person) and do theatre like dark play (not the mainstream stuff). Anyone have any contacts?

Today on YouTube ...

"Everyone's a Little Bit Jewish," featuring the combined casts of Avenue Q and Fiddler, from a Broadway Cares benefit.  Courtesy of Tboy's friend Matt, who certifies it as both kosher and "the funniest thing ever."

Dispatch from Humana: Now that's more like it.

In which our correspondent becomes a girl gone wild.

Friday, March 2, 4:04 a.m.

No wry, no drinking, no Southern Gothic?? You are so f*cking demanding!

OK, so as I was finding my seat with my posse, I realised that [Michael John] Garces was sitting in it. When I pointed this out, he asked to see my ticket, and promptly ripped it up. That's a gantlet I can't resist, so my intelligent, cultured response was to start unbuttoning my pants. In the back row of the Bingham. He immediately said "Do it! Do it!" Which merely added more fuel to the fire. Consequently, I mooned him at close quarters in a sold-out theatre on opening night. Amazingly, very few people seem to have noticed.

No wry here, just ribald. But that's me.

We just finished our ten out of twelve, and then repaired to a cast member's apartment to decompress. I love being able to talk about life with people I'm working hard with on something that we all believe in -- people I've never met before, might not ordinarily seek out or come across, who are so different from me, who I have so much to learn from, and to whom I may have something to offer.

And this is an obscure reference, but my belt buckle in the show has a funky kind of rectangular boxlike shape which has inspired many "box" jokes and merits a mention of the "I put my box in a box" video on You Tube.

Later,

-- Jen

By the way, I stand corrected by a resident: it's Looahvul, not Luhvul. Either way, sounds like you just came from the dentist.

The Equus reviews ...

... are in, and they seem to enjoy frolicking about with words like "equimaniac" and "hippophile."

Guardian eminence Michael Billington puts it bluntly, right at the top of his review: "Forget all the prurient press speculation about Harry Potter's private parts. The revelation of this revival is that Daniel Radcliffe really can act."

(Bonus reading: Billington on the history of stage nudity, a story Tboy likewise enjoyed exploring a few years back in this City Paper piece. Though Tboy wasn't genius enough to slip a "hoo-ha" past his editors. Or to end on "half-cocked.")

The Times' Benedict Nightingale likewise takes the direct route: "OK, it was exactly what all that prurient hype promised."  (Aside: When did critics for The Times of London begin launching their reviews with American colloquialisms?)

The Telegraph drools a bit, saying that "the diminutive (but perfectly formed)" Radcliffe "brilliantly succeeds in throwing off the mantle of Harry Potter, announcing himself as a thrilling stage actor of unexpected range and depth."

The Independent, by contrast, is content with "Radcliffe acquits himself well."

Most everyone likes John Napier's design (though for what it's worth, Tboy thinks the horse mask looks like a fruit bowl, at least from the Reuters photo on the Telegraph site).

As for the play, here's Nightingale:  "Equus is at root dated, pretentious and even a bit pernicious ..."

And Billington: "What disturbs me, 34 years after the play's premiere, is the way ... Shaffer romanticises pain."

Both of the big boys take swipes, sidelong or otherwise, at R.D. Laing, whose notions influenced Shaffer's thinking on the blandness of normality.

So there you have it: The critics, as usual, are all over the map.

Dispatch from Humana, Episode the Third

Because no visit to the Deep South is complete without a story involving an actor, a hit-and-run, and a woman who's given her husband the metaphorical finger by destroying some significant piece of property. (Tboy can say this because he's from the Deep South, and because no sh*t he has a cousin who tried to set her husband on fire. But he warns you Yankees not to get all supercilious, because we'll shoot your asses.)

Friday, Feb. 23

Our play is coming along fabulously: had a good designer run yesterday, despite the fact that it was 80 degrees in the room (Bikram Theatre). Our playwright came back today and we did another run today.

No one has opened yet: I'm looking forward to seeing all of them. The Unseen is Craig's play that takes place in a prison; Sherry's piece is sort of a history of American/Middle Eastern relations, as filtered through Barbie and the death of a mother ...

We go drinking with the cast of Strike/Slip, by Naomi Iizuka, who I met in the elevator today, and one of the cast members got hit by a car driven by a woman who had just taken her four children out of her house when the house blew up. We found out later that she's going through a bitter divorce (the euphemism for THE GUY'S BEING A TOTAL DICKHEAD) and her husband wasn't going to get the house, so he blew it up for the insurance money. The cast member is healing, but arrives at the bar in a wheelchair. She said the whole incident was very much of a piece with the play.

I just saw Josh Lefkowitz, who's in The As/If Body Loop, the last play to start rehearsing.

More later,

-- Jen

Dispatch from Humana, part deux

Mendenhall gets serious scoping out the lay of the Luhvul land ...

Sunday, Feb. 11

Humana is starting to get busy: Naomi Iizuka showed up for the first read of her piece (Strike Slip). Of interest to DC audiences is Craig Wright (The Unseen) and Sherry Kramer (When Something Wonderful Ends), whose new plays are both being done.  Josh Lefkowitz, who did that great one-man piece at the Fringe and then at Woolly, is here too, in one of the other plays.

There are what seems like 50 apprentices, who work like dogs. There are also two other projects, The Open Road Anthology, which is a collaborative writing project, and Susan Lori Parks'  365 plays.

I played darts at Freddy's last night. My kind of place. Cash only, and bring an oxygen tank. You should come, if at all possible. There's a great energy here.

Best,

Jen

Dispatch from Humana

First in a series of occasional missives from Jennifer Mendenhall, who's camped out in Luvuhl. It's been languishing in Tboy's inbox for 13 days, about which he feels some chagrin.

Friday, Feb. 9

Third day of rehearsals on dark play, or stories for boys by Carlos Murillo, at the Humana Festival. In the cast are Liz Morton, Lou Sumrall, Matt Stadelmann (who was the kid in Velvet Sky at Woolly) and Will Rogers (who was in columbinus at Round House and in N.Y., and who's another NCSA graduate). Michael John Garces is directing.

Small world evidenced by the director and the playwright discovering, during auditions, that they were both at the American school in Bogota, Columbia, at the same time when they were kids.

I'm in an apartment on the 18th floor; the balcony holds a sick fascination for me. Feeling slightly ragged today: my birthday was Wednesday and Will's was yesterday, and Freddy's is a classic dive like the ones we used to have in D.C.

[Ed.:  It took Tboy some time to parse that last, but by "classic dive" he now understands Mendenhall to mean "the sort of place one spends several hours getting to know on one's birthday."]

Gotta shower.

-- Jen