theaterboy®

What Tboy's mourning this week.

This guy, though I didn't know him. I wish to hell I'd known somebody like him when I was in high school.  It's a measure of how fast the world's changing that there was nobody like him when I was in high school.

This broad--and she was, in the best of all possible senses, a broad. Didn't know her, but I did meet her (at a gay-j thing, I think it was, where she spoke), and she was funny and warm and not the least bit taken by her success.

And yes, this horse. I know, it doesn't make any sense -- but it breaks my heart that he didn't get to live out his life doing the stud thing, getting laid and eating the good hay and not having to run.

Here's my wish: We should all be as moved by the people around us, by their triumphs and their agonies, as we were by this animal and his.

If it's Wednesday ...

... it's Wee Jane.

(Better late than never, Tboy supposes.) She's got Geraint Wyn Davies on the Richard and Kevin Moore on leaving Woolly for Cleveland.

About the former: Tboy hears there have been at least three public performances where the drawing-and-quartering bit (y'know, the ropes and the rigging at the end) hasn't come off properly, and the star has ended the play in a heap upstage.

Bummer.

Money quote from the Moore bit, meanwhile, about Craig Wright's Recent Tragic Events:

"The first draft we read was only 50 pages long and there was a sock puppet playing Joyce Carol Oates. I was afraid we would come off as exploiting the tragedy."

In the Follow Spots spot: DC-based playwrights Caleen Sinette Jennings (at right) and Karen Zacarias have made the semifinal cut for this year's O'Neill Playwrights Conference.

The full column lives here.

Other NYT randomness ...

Tboy is here to tell you that this kinda thing ain't unique to New York, or to Stoppard, or even to new shows. 

A friend was telling Tboy the other day that Netflix served him up a "Local Favorites" list of what his Dupont Circle neighbors were queueing up right that minute.

At the top of the list: Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

My people, my people. [Sigh...] Sometimes the stereotypes are right.

Speaking of the Albee: It's the example in the lede of this NYT story about onstage smoking and the growing number of local ordinances that ban it. (It's apparently illegal in Chicago, the story says, but authorities turn a blind eye.)

Tboy assumes we've no worries here in D.C. -- he's pretty sure Kathleen Turner lit up earlier this month --  but does anyone actually know how the new law reads?

O League? O Helen? What say you?  And are the rules different if you're producing in the back room at Playbill Cafe than if you're renting at the Source?

The mind boggles.

Mike Jones, the guy who brought Ted Haggard down, goes into the lions den. With a bunch of actors:

"Jones visited on Sunday with members of a New York-based theater troupe, The Civilians, who are researching a project on evangelicals. "

Can't wait to see what kind of subplots turn up in that show.

You are not alone.

Yesterday's Chicago Trib had a big spread on actor income (hat tip to the nice director gent who sent it along). The intro's pretty obvious, though I suppose the overview of pay structures might be new to the general public.

(And Tboy wonders why they didn't explain how some theaters find creative ways to pay more than Equity minimum, without bothering about things like, y'know, taxes and pension contributions.  Tboy has heard such interesting things about one local theater and untaxed per diems, for instance--per diems, y'hear, even for local actors. Though that was a coupla years back, and maybe they've reformed.)

But the real fun, in the Trib story [free reg. required] comes in the little one-paragraph artist profiles that follow. Ferinstance: Actor/co-artistic director, 27, Non-Equity, single; earned $4000 from theater and $3000 from TV in 2006.  Ack.

Theater blogger Don Hall is one of the others in the roundup, but Tboy has to say he doesn't surrender much in the way of financial detail.

Then there's Joel Hatch (at left in the photo, rehearsing for The Adding Machine at Evanston's Next Theatre); he tells the Trib he made $40K-$50K last year.

Says Hatch:

"There are very few cities anywhere ... where I could do musical theater, Shakespeare, straight theater, comedy, dramas, all those things, and be booked throughout the year in the same city and live in my own house. That is a rare thing."

Now, Tboy knows from 12 years of talking to you all and watching you work that D.C. is one of those "very few cities." But of course the range is every bit as broad as Chicago's: He knows that some of you do pretty well. And that some of you are eating cat food and cardboard. And he admires you for sticking with it; God knows if there's a worse (relatively entitled) life than that of the freelance writer, it's gotta be that of the struggling actor.

So feel free to commiserate with your Chicago brethren in the comments here. Or to count your blessings.

But what will it mean for Jason?

NYT's getting a new theater editor.

(Courtesy George Hunka, who's written for the Times, and before that Rob Kendt, who ditto... )

Tboy can confirm that Patti Cohen was a most agreeable editor. She didn't hit him even once when he filed a story that was roughly twice as long as they'd talked about.

Browser issues fixed.

Or at least Tboy thinks so.  There was a bit of Javascript that was designed to pull content from elsewhere on the Internets.  But for some reason, like a little Java black hole, it was sucking in all the content from the mainbar into the sidebar.

No more.  Tboy has squashed it like a bug. He hopes.

Somebody please give him a shout if there's any more trouble, OK?

Speaking of genderwhack ...

... and we were, weren't we?

Tboy's nightstand reading right now is Self-Made Man, Norah Vincent's extraordinary memoir of her year-and-a-half living and working among the hairy ones .

Disguised as one of the hairy ones.

That's her on the cover there. Yep, both pictures.  She cut her hair, bulked up her shoulders, found a theater queen to teach her how to apply a convincing stubble.  She passed as a man in blue-collar bowling alleys, high-powered sales offices, and skanky strip clubs. She made friends with the boys, and dated women, and betrayed both every time she sat down to scribble her notes about what she'd learned among them.

It's an astounding book, full of startling observation couched in impressively lean prose. Dr. H gave it to Tboy for Christmas, along with a copy of the original Pajama Game and a new podcast microphone, among other things. And damn if right this minute, anyway, it's not Tboy's favorite gift.

We're not equipped.

Nick Fracaro of Thieves Theatre makes (playful?) trouble over at Rat Sass about the no-men rules attached to V-Day, the global celebration of Eve Ensler ... er, the global anti-violence-against-women event.

(To be clear, the rules bar men from performing in The Vagina Monologues, not from working backstage or in other roles.)

Nick's meanderings were sparked by a listserv request for "male companion pieces" to be performed on V-Day.  His views on the topic -- entertaining, thoughtful sometimes, and decidedly wide-ranging -- are here and here, in order of posting.

Akerley, SAS, Spinster: Go get him.

Technorati Tags: gender

Tboy missed this.

Which is what he gets for not reading the print paper anymore. You tend not to find these things online unless somebody points 'em out ...

Anyway, from the WashPo:

Note the severe-looking gent bottom left.

True story: One of MK's staffers framed it and gave it to him as an opening-night present.