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Today's Random Observation

If, for your road-tripping diversion, you build a smart playlist in iTunes, using the text string "Blue" as a filtering criteria in song titles and naming said playlist "Life in Blue," you wind up listening to a disproportionate amount of Johnny Cash on your way back to D.C. from North Carolina.

That is all.

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.

Peter Marks does a drive-by ...

... at the tail end of his Meet John Doe review, which Tboy is reading at a coffeeshop near his folks' cabin in Rutherfordton, N.C. (It's pronounced Ruffton, because we're lazy down here. And yes, Tboy is still on vacation, so don't expect much more this week.)

Still: Tboy couldn't help but giggle at this graf:

Ford's, too, deserves applause for taking a chance on this material. Some other major companies in town seem content these days to feast on well-cooked chestnuts.

Goodness. Wonder which "major company" Peter could have in mind?

Tboy is on vacation

There were nephews to be visited. And what with the new job coming up next week, Tboy figured he'd better visit while the visiting was good.

Now he's been in Augusta, Ga.--yes, he has visited the scene of the shopping-mall drive-through--for three days, and he's remembering why he usually sets that amount of time as the upper limit.  He's upstairs in the spare bedroom at his sister's house, because downstairs:

1. Nephew the Youngest is shrieking. No particular reason. Just shrieking.
2. Nephew the Eldest, who is nominally brushing his teeth, is in fact pretending to brush his teeth while in actuality conducting experiments having to do with determining precisely what mixture of toothpaste and spittle is required to produce an 18-inch string of drool.
3. Nephew the Worst is scratching his behind with one hand while exploring the region of his private parts with the other.

Tboy dearly loves his nephews. But: While he knows he's not exactly a high-risk candidate, he intends to have himself sterilized as soon as the new NPR health bennies kick in.

Dispatch from Humana: Of home, family, and p*nis aprons

This one, too, got buried. It's from last Friday. Tboya culpa.

Friday, March 16

Just back from a whirlwind visit home, where I bought an obscene amount of groceries to demonstrate my love for Michael, Henry and Vivian, went ice-skating with them, ran errands, returned Mary Resing's cell phone that she left in my car in Looahvul while she was dramaturging dark play,  and arranged summer camps for my children which include gymnastics, art, a Shakespeare camp, horseback riding and (the highlight of my son's summer) a week at Target, Skeet and Clay Pigeon Shooting and 3D Archery Camp. Michael is doing a heroic job of single parenting in my absence. More than that, he is enjoying it, and gives me his blessing to fly away and dive into this wonderful experience. I babysat for him Monday and Tuesday, when he had rehearsals for a reading at First Amendment that Paul Tacaks (sp?) is directing. Henry and Vivian are doing very well, in their own explosively bi-polar, boundary stretching ways. It was interesting being home for three days. I figured out what is so exhilarating/exhausting about being with children: they experience in 24 hours the range and depth of emotion that I do in a month. And I'm an out there, passionate person! But my daughter can put any Shakespearean actress to shame before 7am. Never mind "Out, damned spot!" Try "I don't like these socks!"

Back in Looahvul, my dark play cast is as fine a group of individuals as one could hope to be stranded on the banks of the Ohio river with. Given the repertory nature of the schedule, we have between two and four days off between performances, which means we get together and do a line-through or a walk-through before we do the show again, just to make sure all the pieces are still there. It's a very rhythmic production with a small margin for error: if you are off by a split second, you've spoilt the elegance. The audience might not know, but you feel awful. So far I think we've had great shows, full of energy, moving in the right direction, remaining faithful to the (brilliant) direction of Señor Garces. Sh*t happens, though. Liz Morton's parents came to see her last night: she carefully picked seats that would keep them shielded from her (brief) nudity, only to have them spotlit in the audience by an errant, erratically mobile light that somehow selected random targets throughout the show, instead of shining where it ought to.

We stay up way too late and drink way too much and talk about everything. I hear the poker game went till 6am. There's talk of a double-cast bowl-off next week, and Josh Lefkowitz is going to do his one-man show for us. BYOB.

I saw previews of Strike/Slip and The As-If Body Loop, both interesting plays with really good actors. They share the same theatre, but use the space in a completely different way. Strike/Slip is a "Crash"-like, episodic exploration of relationships with the central theme of the unexpected movement of tectonic plates. The space is wide open, with islands of set pieces that slide in and out of view; the actors stay onstage the whole time, in the wings but visible when they're not in a scene. Body Loop has an attic suspended from the grid, twenty feet up, with a spiral staircase (not a good thing for those of us with a sick fascination with heights), and traps that bring set pieces up to the stage as the scene shifts; it posits the theory that we have a collective responsibility to bear the pain of this world, using Lamed Vavniks (look it up), alternative healing and football to make its point. I haven't seen Sherry Kramer's play yet, but hope to next week, as well as Batch, which performs at a gay nightclub. They have some fun costumes which I saw when I had fittings in the costume shop: headpieces and bustiers made with Twizzlers and a penis apron (apron with appendage attached, not a tiny frilly accessory for a dick) chief among them. This weekend is a big college student weekend, also my Mom and the Rorschach crew will be here.

Once again, it's late, and I must say good night. Just another exhausting day off in Looahvul. I think I may be in heaven.

-- Jen

Wooo-ho ... nah, nevermind.

Marvin Hamlisch will salute you all at the Helen Hayes to-do.

Wait a minute while Tboy contains himself.

P.S. - Tboy finds it amusing that Derek Jacobi is a footnote in a Marvin Hamlisch press release. That is all.

More on the young critics' program

So several of you sent me suggestions for the D.C.-Belfast young critics program, for which thanks.  But today's news is that I've had guidance from one of the coordinators about how writers should apply.  So take a minute and read this, willya?

1). If you sent me a résumé, I've already forwarded it. Still, it couldn't hurt for you to apply directly, with a cover note expressing your interest and explaining why you want to take part in the exchange. See below.

2). If you didn't send me a CV, don't.  Send it instead to Sioned Hughes, whose address is Sioned.Hughes (at) visitingarts.org.uk, with a cover note as described above. Deadline is March 23.

3). Eligibility is limited to arts writers based in the D.C. area. See below. Contact Sioned for more information. But here's the basic overview. Enjoy:

"This programme will be run in partnership with the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, and will occur as part of the Rediscovering Northern Ireland Festival in Washington DC. The Young Critics Programme provides an opportunity for young writers from Northern Ireland to connect with their counterparts in Washington DC.

"Designed on the basis that a community of critical writers makes an essential contribution to democratic societies and a flourishing arts scene, the Young Critics Programme aims to create links between different cultures as well as contributing to the appreciation and development of arts criticism.

"During the programme, time will be spent in both Belfast and Washington DC, with the 6 participants attending a writing workshop, visiting galleries and attending a variety of performances.  They will write reviews, discuss their work together, and explore the role of the art critic.  Established arts critics will tutor the workshop.

[snip]

"The week in Washington DC will build on the work done in Northern Ireland, with a similar programme of reviewing a variety of work, with the benefit of critic mentors from Washington DC. The dates for the programme are May 5 – 19, 2007, with everyone arriving in Washington on May 12th.

"There will be 3 participants from Northern Ireland and 3 from Washington DC.  ...  I would expect the candidates to have a demonstrable interest in the arts and to have already started their journalistic career in some capacity."

The Friday Open Thread

Too busy with a couple of deadlines to think of topics for you, not that many of you seem to care. But amuse yourselves if you like ...

Tboy has decided to be nice today.

Which is why he's not going to name names.

But he is going to giggle, just the tiniest bit, about how cute it was to see two notable D.C.-based actor-types standing outside the National Theatre stage door last night, jittery as schoolkids, waiting nervously for Cherry Jones to come out so they could tell her how much they love her.

Tboy, as you may recall, has a little Cherry Jones crush, too, so let's make it clear he's not actually sneering here. He's just poking a little fun.

And in celebration of crushes in general, and Cherry Jones in particular, he offers this, the first segment of what would appear to be a nice, long, terribly written TV melodrama with Jones and Brooke Shields as a Florida couple whose child becomes the focus of a legal battle after Jones dies and Shields forgets how to act.

Bonus: Anne Meara plays Jones' mommy ...

Your next tour ...

... could be a very long one indeed.