NYTI #1: Personal (Revisionist) History

Image (redacted) by
Sha-Nee Williams.

In about a week, I'll be performing on stage again. Twice, in a way. Once performing a reading of someone else's personal narrative. The same night, that person will be performing my own - and I will be sitting on stage while he or she does so (just as they will for my recitation). Of the two, I'm far more nervous for the latter, because I'm not sure I got my story right.

No, YOU Tell It! is a great "switched-up storytelling" event that I came to by way of my participation in Liars' League NYC a few months ago. It combines the experiences of storytelling and story-writing in interesting work, providing a venue not only for hearing your words performed by someone else, but one in which you workshop those words with your fellow performers, a couple of directors, and the NYTI organizers. Accordingly, for the past few weeks I've met with a group of collaborators to hammer out my written contribution to the evening. It's been an ideal situation in which to work on something I generally try to avoid - revision.

But how much revision can possibly be required of a personal narrative, in which the events are all a matter of historical record? I thought gamely to myself, imagining perhaps that I was getting away with a kind of self-congratulatory "discipline." Turns out: A lot. A whole lot.

I believe you cannot call yourself a writer if you don't thoroughly revise. Part of the beauty of writing is that one has absolute control, and can benefit from applying perspective broadened by almost limitless time and objectivity to a single moment of the audience's experience. So why do I avoid it? Frankly, it's painful. I've known writers who enjoy the process, who in fact struggle through the blank page and cranking out letter after letter just in the hopes of reaching the stage of the chisel. All they want is to refine, and cut away the excess. Weirdos.

Every error stings. Without getting too analytical: I think my pain has something to do with a need to be right, smart, and - as you might be inclined to infer - right smart. It is an indubitable personal flaw. Particularly when coupled with my propensity for excessive verbiage and high-falutin' vocabulary. And is it not truly intelligent to apply attention to turning out a finished and considered product? Ah, well. I am an convoluted conundrum wrapped in a non-redacted riddle.

I viewed this No, You Tell It! experience as a unique opportunity to challenge the pain and 1) write a first draft heedless of polish, and 2) revise it, cut it and "kill my darlings" all to heck-and-back. I even revised my website in the process, which was long overdue, and may soon be moving this here 'blog over to there. Consolidation is the key to an awesome thing.

But I had somehow to mitigate the pain of censoring my unbound, inspired genius (IRONY). So I collected the longer or more inspired cuts (read: I hoarded every last deletion) and will present one daily - without any particular context - leading up to next Monday's premiere of my personal narrative: Lost Track. And so, without further ado, I present to you the first in a series of excerpts not good enough for a final product:

"Theatre, you know, is widely considered to be behind-the-times. But it takes a particular appreciation to specialize in a form of theatre that had its heyday in fourteenth-century Italy. That means that when people ask you what you do, you not only have to hope they accept your willingness to invest time and energy into a medium that pays nothing and nobody seems to especially want around, but A SUBSET OF that medium that seems for all intents and purposes to be dead and gone."

No, YOU Tell It! - "Outdated" takes place 7:00 pm Monday, April 22nd, at Jimmy's 43, and requires no ticket, nor reservation (though you may have plenty after reading this). It fills up quick, and the bar is crowded so...you know.

How To

These words are not mine. Well, these words are, sure, of course. But the ones below? The ones in quotes? Those ain't. They're very, very good words of advice about 1. sustaining an organization (an arts organization, in particular), and 2. integrating with a community in a meaningful way. These words, this "How To," if you will, come from Ms. Natalie Brown of Alternacirque and Delirium Tribal Bellydance fame.

I first became aware of Natalie and Anternacirque when high school chum Kate Fox noticed she had two friends (at least) through Facebook who posted pictures of themselves doing things in crazy circus contexts. Since that time I've watched Alternacirque flourish, so much so that it's made me wish I lived a little closer. Today, Natalie was inspired to leave a lengthy post on Facebook about their success, and graciously permitted me to quote it.

This is it, in its entirety, with no editing on my part. Down with form letters, emails and phone calls...

"I seem to be having the same conversation over and over with various people about Alternacirque, Delirium, and our success among the muggle population. And it's pretty basic stuff, really: go invest in your community and they will invest in you.

"And I don't mean send out a bunch of form newsletters or emails or phone calls. Go out and actually shake their hands and put your business cards in them. Go see art gallery openings. Go see shows. Go attend festivals as a spectator and strike up conversations with people holding clipboards or badges. Go to mayoral political debates (especially if they're having one centered around the arts), stick around for the rope line, and then go have a drink with everyone around you to analyze the candidates. Know what your legislators look like, so when you pass them on the street, or they come through your line at the coffee shop, or you're standing behind them in line at the coffee shop, you can tell them what you think or what you need. Know their right and left hand henchpeople, too. When you meet them, get their cellphone numbers. Ask to go to lunch and pick people's brains. Go hang out where other artists, producers, entrepreneurs and people with power and resources drink, and drink with them. Go see the ballet, and local theater, and take the playbill home and friend every single name in it on facebook, from the cast to the stage crew to the marketing department down to the interns. Know the name of everyone working at your local arts council and state arts commission. Do enough research to know which of those organizations are fairly useless and which actually care. Keep up enough to know when things turn over and they might start being useful. Talk about your art passionately. Listen equally as passionately about their projects. And don't stick with your people. Don't talk to just dancers, or just weirdos, or just artists. Talk to restaurateurs and tech people and the organic/urban food movement in your areas. Share advice and resources as often as you ask for it. Make friends. If your community isn't close-knit, see what you can do to encourage it to be so. As you grow and figure things out, reach down to the kids coming along behind you, and see if you can't make their struggle easier.

"Don't be afraid that people will think you're a freak. A few will. But really, you're probably the most interesting and fascinating person in the room. People would rather hear about what it's like to be a bellydancer than about spreadsheets and conference calls.

"Everyone's town is going to have a different pulse, heartbeat, radio frequency. It's your job to figure out how it functions, and join the flow. You can't do that from your living room. It's much more interesting out there, anyway."

Alternacirque: http://alternacirque.com/bloggyblogblog/

In League with Liars: Storytelling and the Actor

Photo by Andrew Lloyd-Jones.

Last Wednesday, I was a bad husband and father. Well, maybe not a bad husband and father, but an absentee one. But only for a few hours. But it was in the evening. But it was for a cultural event. But it was at a bar. With a bunch of professed liars. And it was my daughter's nine-week birthday.

I am the lowest of the low, and have done little-to-nothing to earn the understanding of my wife.

The Liar's League is a very cool organization that specializes in public readings of short fiction. Their motto: "Writers write. Actors read. Audience listens. Everyone wins." It is, in my opinion, the perfect venue for someone of my stripe - thirty-something, recent father, pragmatic (somewhat) actor who nonetheless occasionally needs to stretch his performing legs. This, too, is how I justify my flagrant negligence of wife and child. The household's psyche is better off for my occasional jaunt back to the boards. Plus: the venue is relaxed, the work of high quality, and the time commitment is very reasonable.

I was introduced to the Liars by Friend Natalia Zubko back in July, mere weeks before Daughter J. would enter the world. Natalia was prescient enough to realize the perfection of the League's match with my new time and mental-space restraints, and when we attended their Public & Private themed reading she took it upon herself to introduce me to the organizers. We enjoyed the evening, and an interesting discussion began about finding the balance - as a performer - between presentation and representation. Or: telling the story versus embodying the moments.

This is a classic conundrum for an actor, in large part because it has so much to do with that horrid convention of casting - the audition monologue. Most audition pieces list toward storytelling, having as they generally ought a beginning, middle and end. Conversely, the point of an audition piece is not actually to tell an effective story (though that can only help) but rather to demonstrate an active, intentioned character who is experiencing things in the present. It is most important that the actor know who they're supposedly talking to - their invisible scene partner - and that said actor is trying clearly and convincingly to persuade their opposite of something. The story if there is one is actually what's happening in the room, not the narration it may involve.

I've a long-held fondness for actual storytelling. That and stand-up comedy were my first real performance opportunities as a kid. Along with reveling in what John Ritter could do with a long phone cord, I spent many an early-eightes Saturday morning watching this one storytelling series on UHF channel 50 (the name of which is long-lost to the annals [ew] of my gray matter). Just a guy with that distinctly awful grooming of the time talking to some kids in a carpeted "activity room," with the occasional prop or puppet. I ate it up, and continue to admire people who are adept at unwinding a good story at cocktail parties and the like.

Fortunately for me I had good, written material on Wednesday last. Don DeLillo, by C.D. Rose, is a slightly abstracted, but generally straight-forward story of a romantic couple who may - or may not - fall apart over certain personal failings; not the least of which might be the fellow's intellectual insecurity. I love the story and the writing, and felt like I could uniquely identify with its narrator in a way that would help the performance. (One of my favorite little things about of the approach of the League is that when they emailed me to ask if I was interested, they attached the story; it should not be as rare as it is to be offered the opportunity to survey the material when someone is asking something of you as a performer.) But here I was, presented in fact with the formerly hypothetical problem I discussed so idly with Natalia months before. To embody, or not to embody?

The answer is of course: To embody. Everyone wants some in-the-moment transportation, even from a cocktail anecdote. If only it were an on/off gradation, however. The difficulty is in choosing the right timing and intensity for capturing the moment. It's a balancing act. Keep both eyes straight ahead. That way, at least if you fall you might be aware of it for a few seconds fewer than you otherwise would.

I'll save some suspense and report - and this is after a week's time, feedback and listening to my own recording on the League's podcast (possibly several times [possibly not solely for critique purposes {how's this for allaying suspense?}]) - that I believe I did OK-fine. I'd say I was in the neighborhood of 75% on-target. That's safe, I'd say. I'm saying. I said.

It's tricky. It takes precision, and it's a precision that can't even be complete after months of rehearsal, because the final information comes from the audience and how they're responding to particular moments. This can be said of acting in any live respect, but the consideration takes on such a unique dimension when it's a little more layered as it is with storytelling, involving a kind of meta-balance of story and moment. As an actor in a play, you generally have this rule to guide you: Believe in it, no matter what, and live there. As a storyteller, you're something of an actor/director, steering as much as riding, based on the charts you sketched out in your rehearsal. And you can get lost.

I got a little lost, I must admit. It was disorienting; a new medium. I never lost my place in the words, but there were certainly moments in which I thought well I'm not sure where we are just now I think this moment needs a little examination no? no we have to keep going? all right then we're going and I guess hey when did I last inhale...?  My tendency, and it shouldn't have surprised me (but it did), was to revert to being the actor, feeling the moment. If anything, I over-did on that side. Somewhat. My priority was to serve the writing, which kept me from going overboard outright, but my tendency was to be an actor. Interesting conflict, that.

Also interesting, coming from my experience, was just how effective it was to detach from the material at the right moments. Perhaps it was the audience, who were made up severally of writers, but there were several times when I reported something written and the words did the work better than I could have with any special interpretation. And - in spite of what Mamet may posit - this is not the general rule.

Also fun was the audience interaction. In this milieu there's a blend between what an actor does, and what a stand-up or orator can do. Even before I learned about the commedia dell'arté, I was obsessed with effective moments of breaking the fourth wall, and at one particular moment toward the beginning of my tale I got to do that with a facial expression in response to an audience member's applause. It was a moment in which none of us could be sure I was in character. My reaction was appropriate to the voice of the story, but obviously there was no [Pause for silent response to audience.] written there. It doesn't carry over on the recording, having been visual, and I rather savor that. A gentle nod toward the ephemeral nature of live entertainment.

I think serving the words as best one can is probably the closest thing to advice we can offer an actor stepping into the storytelling arena, at least when it comes to scripted storytelling. (Perhaps aptly enough, this is also popular advice for performing Shakespeare.) That's subjective as all get-out, but getting much more specific risks hampering the unique abilities an actor can bring to the story. I might rephrase it, though, to give it a little more impact for types such as myself:

The story is for you, but not about you, and similar to something as unique and rare as a piece in a museum the story is to be shared. You are the one who gets to share the story with the rest of the world. Be sure to be moved by it, be sure to explore it to the breadth and depth it merits. Do not drape or gild it, though. Let it speak for itself, through you.

Something like that. It really is a precious thing. Fun too! But precious. If they'll have me, I think I'll be back.

Photos & layout by Andrew Lloyd-Jones.

Bang! Pow! Zwounds!: Richard III as "Graphic Novel"

Editor's Note: Once again, I'm adapting personal email into 'blog posts. I shall mutlti-task, and you shall dig it. This comes out of a discussion with a director friend of mine who was tasked with considering a production of Richard III based on a graphic-novel approach.

Found here. Grisly remains found here?

So: "a pre-1700's graphic novel story," eh? First of all: Do we mean a graphic novel written and drawn in the "pre-1700s"? A graphic novel set in the "pre-1700s"? And why the "pre-1700s"? Do we set Richard the Three in 1699, or Roman-occupied Ireland, or dare we make it 1485? {Ed.: I've since learned that the particular audience in discussion rejects any Shakespeare set later than that as being too much a departure from historical accuracy. Hilarious.}

But my greater confusion here is what on earth we mean by "graphic novel." That's a little bit like saying, "Let's produce a Richard the Third like a pre-1700s movie story." Graphic novels are a medium about as varied as cinema.

But not everyone knows that, and were I to assume (thereby making an ass out of you and ume) a thing or two, I might assume we mean a sort of highbrow comicbook approach. Somehow. Which is still about as clear as the mud from which one might need a horse in order to extricate oneself.

My assumption however is based on the following facts:

• The most commercially viable and well-known printed graphical storytelling of the prior and current centuries has been "comic books"; and
• "Graphic novels" is a popular term for comic books when you're trying to lend them prestige, or raise people's opinions of them from out of the pulp.

The term "graphic novels" also frequently refers to works that have a little more length or over-arcing story to them than some, but that usage is a little reductive as it implies all "graphic novels" were written in one go (like a novel) when in fact the majority were originally published in a serial manner. Comic books, in other words, then collected into the so-called graphic novel.

So what are we to do with a concept based on highbrow comicbooks? In short (HA HA HA) there are too many different kinds of graphic novels to know what we mean when we use that ill-defined term, and the differences traverse everything from art to layout to content. A few varietals:

• Maus - seminal in raising the reputation of comicbooks; it casts mice as Jews and cats as Nazis in a true story of one family's experience of the Holocaust
• The Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen - in a fit of zeitgeist, Frank Miller and Alan Moore both eschew/satirize the bubblegum aesthetic of superhero comics; Miller by taking a classic hero and giving him hard-boiled moral ambiguity, and Moore by taking superhero archetypes and subjecting them to a dystopian environment and socio-political realities
• From Hell - Alan Moore here again, this time writing an exhaustively long "graphic novel" that delves into one possible explanation for the identity of Jack the Ripper
• Sandman - what began as a pitch by Neil Gaiman to revitalize some of DC Comics' forgotten characters evolved into an epic story with a beginning, middle and end that chronicles the king of dreams (and his family: Death, Desire, Despair, Destiny, Destruction and Delirium [formerly Delight]) whilst tying in extensive details from the world's mythology, literature and religion

Ma' humps, ma' humps...

And those are fairly conventional examples, as far as just form goes.

I suppose the thing I can't quite wrap my mind around yet is why exactly to apply this concept to this particular work of Shakespeare's. As I see it, there are other plays of his - even other Histories - that might be better fits. Henry V is a pretty good Superman/superhero analogue. Hell, the Henry VIs have those constant turn-overs that would make pretty interesting structure for exploring "serialized" storytelling on stage. Richard III may be episodic enough for serialized storytelling, if that's the angle, but I can't quite make it work without adding layers.

Recently it has been tremendously popular to adapt graphic novels into movies and, even more recently, television. The Walking Dead, for example, is an on-going serialized story that's perfect for television. But they also adapted Watchmen into a film, which tried to do too much and with so much flash that the vital humanity of the story was lost. Even Ang Lee made a superhero movie with the first Hulk Hollywood blockbuster, which in my opinion is practically a lesson in what elements NOT to take from graphic storytelling when adapting from it.

Is there a better reference? Nope.

When they go wrong, what many adaptions have done is adhered too closely either to the content or the form of graphic storytelling (or both). When a graphic-novel story is transported cross-media, it's an injustice not to re-conceive at least a little. Two Frank Miller comics have been adapted into what most consider to be quite successful movies - his Sin City and 300 - and both with a keen eye on staying loyal to the aesthetic of the source material. I would argue, however, that as graphically similar as these movies are to the artwork from which they came, they are in fact very thoroughly re-imagined into a cinematic landscape. Miller went on to direct his version of The Spirit, which copped Sin City's look and failed miserably, lacking the originality of the other two adaptations.

Graphic novels, or comicbooks, work because of the spaces between the panels and how our minds fill those in. They give you some of the interpretive freedom of books or radio, with more of the visual fireworks of TV or film. It takes a certain amount of mental coding to read them, but that can be learned intuitively, and when a good unity between the words, layout and illustrations can be achieved, the story-telling is enhanced. Simply sliding that on top of a film, the languages do not converse. Movies are all about seeing change, seeing it very closely. Just because one of the steps to creating them involves story-boarding doesn't mean that a medium that utilizes frames and composition will automatically translate. You're still filling in the white spaces. You're still animating the iconic.

When it comes to adapting a live show into a "graphic novel" context, there are a few examples from which to pull, but most of them take a fairly satirical (or lightly tongue-in-cheek) slant and have more to do with traditional superhero comics than more varied graphic storytelling. I was in a production of Stand-Up Tragedy in college for which the director brought the main character's comicbook imagination somewhat to life on stage with enormous puppet cut-outs, but that was for one sequence only and functioned rather more as a simple staging element than as anything functional. Vampire Cowboys here in New York have done many a popular show using comicbook tropes, but these are largely original productions and focus on the combat elements (not a bad notion at least by the end of Richard III). I don't know of any examples specific to only the medium itself - not the characters within them, for example.

So anyway: why Richard III in this context? Perhaps we are thinking of him as a character similar to superheroes like Marvel's X-Men mutants, who are ostracized and persecuted for being different, said difference being what makes them special and powerful? Perhaps Richard's story is episodic enough to remind of serialized story-telling - there is a strong procession of scenes of mounting ambition and stakes. Perhaps we're thinking aesthetically of something that utilizes iconography, or stained-glass windows, both of which comic books owe something to.

Yet in discussing all this, what I'm struck by is a very different idea. Richard III reminds me of nothing so much as the trend in television over the last five years or so for highly successful, critically acclaimed shows to feature a main character who is morally flawed. Don Draper of Mad Men is a philanderer, Walter White of Breaking Bad is someone we've watched become (or simply come into being) a ruthless criminal, Dexter is a fracking serial killer, and a host of other shows have followed suit - Damages, Boss, etc. In other words, tragedy makes for great television. In terms of a contemporary hook for RIII, that's where my mind goes. Those shows are incredibly effective, and we root for some of the worst characters in them the hardest. Did this begin with Tony Soprano, or Richard the III?

I have no ideas, however, about how to invite those influences on a production. That's an entirely other conversation. One we should have soon!

Where Is My Mind?

A couple of Saturdays back, our aerial silks teacher held her second student showcase. Wife Megan being in a maternal way, she was unable to perform, but she choreographed, and I was lucky enough to be subject to her whims (and thus, you have her to blame for my provocative costuming). Along with my scene partner Jeanne Barenholtz I enacted a Fight Club-inspired routine to the Pixies' angsty classic Where Is My Mind?. All photos compliments Seamus Maclennan.

A miasma of silky warm-up.

We were aiming for right-angled awkward, but this just looks flat-out weird.

Just don't ask about the fabric burns. For, like, at least another week more.

Don't worry - there's actually at least three layers of undies there.

This is all Jeanne.

This, less so.

I wasn't eating chocolate. That was a jellied smear of stage blood, until my sweat took over.

Our silks were not rigged that close, hence our bulging guns (OK: Jeanne's bulging guns).

Some questions.

For some reason, it terrifies me to state outright what I want. (Apart, of course, from my Tumblr proclivities.) I'm not sure why. Fear of failure? Need to please? Neurotic (for sure)? This aversion has even put my toes in the fire once or twice (including one especially memorable high school moment when my girlfriend yelled at me in the hall between classes, "You don't know what you want and that terrifies me!") yet I've not changed it significantly for the better. So when a career survey I was working through tossed a few questions at me, I thought it might be interesting - success or failure - to post the results.

Interesting to whom, I daren't contemplate.

1.) What do I want out of life?
Well, (I love thinking-pauses in text) I want a storied experience. Preferably those stories involve overcoming adversity and making things a little better than they have been, but even failure and disappointment can make for good stories. My personal definition of success has changed repeatedly over time, but coming out of it with stories has always been redeeming. To me that means taking as little for granted as possible, and saying yes to any opportunity I possibly can. I want to create stories, and for my personal story, I want to create a family. That's a part of my story I've known I've wanted for a long time.

2.) What do I want to give to this life?
Everything? I don't want to leave anything undone, or have regrets about the efforts not attempted. There's balance in how much one gives and keeps but in terms of anything related to my life, I see no reason not to give my all: time, effort, aspiration. If there's something to keep, I'd say perspective, or at least sanity. And even sanity is overrated in a number of situations. If I'm going to be as specific as possible in responding to this question, I'd say I want to give love. (Lately I keep thinking of that amazing line from the film Adaptation: "You are what you love, not what loves you.")  Sorry to take it down a bit of a golden-brick road, but anything done with love really does come out fantastic, and there's all different kinds of love. I think love is a decent legacy in terms of what one gives to the life they want.

3.) What is it about the world that I dislike, am most bothered by, or hate the most; and would most love to correct, fix, or eradicate if I could?
When it comes to little things, this list is pretty endless. When it comes to big things, I get overwhelmed before the list can become endless. From petty annoyances like people who rush into the subway without letting people off, to, you know, War, there's plenty to change. In most of the work I've done for myself, I've aspired to break people out of windows. I see our world as one in which people have become too comfortable with the idea of personal distance and routine, experiencing stories on a cold plastic screen (as though through a window) and ignoring anything around them that isn't a practical part of getting through a day. I hate - in myself most of all - that sort of appetite- and survival-driven zombie-ism. I'd eradicate it if I could. As it stands, I try to create experiences of perception and gratitude to counteract it.

4.) What product or service does my community or the world really, really need?
I'm going to try to answer both of these, to see where it leads.

A service is the easiest for me to conceive of, since that's essentially the role I perceive my theatre work to have been. Theatre creates a communal, personal experience that transports people through an idiom with which they are generally comfortable (audience/performer relationship) into personal connection, imagination and discussion. But if I were to name a new service that my world badly needs, it would be a conduit to this sort of experience - be it theatre or some other live art, church or a wicked karaoke scene. In other words, a service that connects audiences with genuinely new experiences they really want to have. What it means to be a "community" has been rapidly changing, and needs a service that is a new connective tissue.

All of that invariably leads me to my notions for a product. I'm drawn toward technology, naturally, as it fascinates me as much as anyone else within my demographic. Yet I also value artifacts - physical objects that are unique and tactile. We need a product that really exists, without being divorced from computer-based application. An "app" is not enough. It would be very nice to figure out some new and appealing social-networking software, but our miraculous "phones" are still windows, barriers of glass, illuminations of connectivity, and not the community itself. My product would be some kind of compass to community, but one that opens your eyes rather than keeps you staring into your palm.

5.) What is it that I would love to do more than anything else in the world?
Absolutes are tricky, but I most often pass satisfaction into the precious world of fulfillment by way of creating or improving things with rigor and attention to detail, as well as broader implications and effects. This activity most often takes the form of inventing comedies and characters, but also applies to writing in just about any form and other things, such as marketing and entrepreneurship. More than anything in the world, today, I'd love to write and critique and teach . . . with perhaps the occasional opportunity to perform.

6.) What is it that most energizes me? What work most exhausts me?
You know, I think exhaustion has a place. Working on shows usually does both of these, and I think that's part of what's so appealing about it. I believe I'm exhilarated by the innovation and collaboration, and exhausted by the chaos and collaboration. I'm energized by projects and newness, be it work at a computer terminal or bouncing around outside, and I'm exhausted by disorganized, maintenance work. What tires me out is a hopelessness that comes from a lack of direction.

7.) What turns me on the most?
Heh-heh.

Beginnings, effective communication and emotional content. I crave an audience at all times (probably especially when I least wish to) and so working in a group is as wonderful for me as a solo project, so long as what's taking place involves listening and caring - caring about what we're aiming for and caring about how we get there. I'm excited by things that transform people's perspectives, and offer challenge and reward in some kind of accessible balance. Great words and great movement turn me on, and a sense of rhythm (kind of like a sound procedure or protocol) will carry that excitement forward indefinitely. I like ideas. Scratch that. I love ideas; I adore them. Amongst people who enjoy thinking creatively, challenging themselves, is hands-down the best place to be for me.

Tiny Black Specks

Ed.: This was supposed to post on Halloween this year as a companion piece to Pavarti's post of the same story from another perspective. Alas, I was too occupied with more important writing-related work (I'll get no arguments from Pavarti) to finish it, so I'm clocking it in late. Sorry, super-fans!

Photo by "Murfomurf."

Even as the seeds of our relationship's destruction were being sown, my first love saved my life.

Let me back up a bit.

I got sick a lot as a kid. I have to some extent been a method actor all my life, which is to say that I've felt that believing the circumstances wholly is the best way to a convincing performance. A healthy dose of masochism doesn't hurt either. Odds are that about half the sick days I took in high school were more like anxiety days, or self-flagellation days. Still, I believed them, even without that important DefCon 1 of childhood illness: the antibiotic.

You knew if you actually went to the doctor, and the doctor actually prescribed something, then you were sick, real and true. In the autumn of my senior year of high school there was a lot going on, and I really did get sick. I was put on just such an antibiotic, and deemed therefore fit for society once more. I was glad for that, since the day was a holiday, and my favorite one at that. On Halloween Day, 1994 - a Monday, as it is this year - I returned to school, fortified and ready for all the excitement once more.

The thing I will always remember are the tiny black specks.

It could have been caused by anything. My mom always gave us a double-dose of whatever antibiotic we were prescribed right away, to jump-start the blood levels. I could, in fact, be allergic to this particular cocktail of micro-organic missile, as my every doctor's form has reflected ever since. Or maybe, just possibly, I rushed through my regular breakfast routine that morning without stopping to consider that the semi-viscous substance suspending my Rice Chex in that bowl was, in fact, milk. And maybe, yes, there was a certain bovine injunction on the side of the orangey, childproof bottle. I may never know.

I may never know because the day itself is an astonishing blur. Not the kind of blur one associates with tremendous speed or urgency, either. Rather, the sort of blur that happens when something is smeared across, or great heat melts something, or some synthetic psychoactive drug chooses to make a mess of your internal relativity. Or, as was the case with me that Halloween Day so long ago, all three, concurrent and consecutive (see note about internal relativity).

Sometime not too far into the school day, maybe after first period, I started to feel nauseous and following fast on the heels of that sensation I vomited into a garbage can. I had the nurse call my mom. Luckily for me, she worked at an elementary school just down the road and had the time to swing by to take me home. I remember lying on my left side in the back of our maroon minivan, trying not to be sick even as I contemplated whether I was making the right choice. I was feeling better. Maybe I could make it through the day, and on into the night's festivities. This thing could still be saved.

It's difficult to remember these events, but not solely because of my altered state. No, as with many other times in my life that proved to be turning points, I've blocked out a lot of details of sequence and experience in my memory. Although I recognize I have a tendency to get mired in my past, I also have a great deal of trouble letting go of my own volition, and so I frequently and by default "forget." That is, "wall memories off where they are forced to live in confinement forever and/or until some silly, silly suggestion that I give them some air is made." It's a bit of an effort to dredge some of this up.

At the time, in the fall semester of my senior year, we were rehearsing a show called Stage Door, in which I played the closest thing to an antagonist the story had. Senior year represented a sea change in my high school experience, having gone far too quickly from chubby band nerd to skinny, upperclassman, leading-man-somewhat-by-default drama nerd. My dearest, passionate, first true love was a junior, but making more headway in choosing a college for the next year than I was. I had also - extremely unexpectedly and as a result of an acting exercise brought to us from a summer intensive our stage manager attended at Northwestern University - recently fallen for my co-star.

A memory doesn't have to be painful for me to quietly wall it away in the intervening years, just embarrassing. This one happens to be both.

I think I went straight to bed when I got home that morning. I think I might've tried water and toast at some or several points, in the hopes of hanging on to the idea of healing. I think I heard the phone ring once or twice. But I know that by the time the phone started ringing I had already vomited at least three more times, and resigned myself to staying in the bathroom. Eventually, the floor of the bathroom became the best place I could imagine and so I laid there, years before I would ever experience the divine punishment of alcohol. By the time I heard the front door opening and my girlfriend's voice calling my name, I was pretty certain it was  a hallucination.

The door to the bathroom was closed at first. Was the bathroom door closed at first? At this point it's all a mess of fingerpaints in my mind. She was always lightly on the goth/punk side - Doc Martens strapped on over fishnets, but a girlish giggle as easily and likely as a throaty guffaw. I'm not sure, but I think my guardian angel was even more punk that particular day, in a nod to the holiday. Regardless of when I let her see me, I somehow remember bright sunlight coming in from the open door downstairs, that same door that still displayed the knuckle-dents from when I punched it in frustration the previous May and broke my metacarpals. The pain of that was fresh in my mind, and it had nothing on what my abdominal muscles were going through as I spasmed and vomited yet again.

"Jeff, I'm calling your mom."

That's a bold sentence when you're a teenager, for any occasion, but especially when you've just skipped school to check on your sick sweetheart. I didn't try to stop her. I stared at the results of my latest heaving in the bowl, and was baffled. Nothing but a little clear fluid, but swimming with tiny, black specks. It was almost funny.

Later, in the emergency room, they would tell me that those black specks were the scrapings of the bottom, the digestive granules produced by the...bile duct? Something. By that time I had been on an IV for dehydration for hours, so I really should be able to remember. Strange that I would let that particular detail go. Maybe it takes days for dehydration to kill you, even when it's accelerated by an allergic response (or whatever) but I certainly wouldn't have made it to the emergency room until late into that night if it hadn't been for my girlfriend knowing it was time to break the rules.

She's always had that kind of unconventional clarity. That's the quality, I think (though also to a lesser degree the fishnets) that made my initial attraction to her so strong. I think of her as one of those kids who never knew they weren't an adult, and now that she is an adult she's got all that assumed authority the years bring to back up her keen perception and audacity. I'm proud we're still friends after all these years, after long stretches of no contact, after I shoved the self-destruct button quietly down on our relationship, after all kinds of personal emergencies and my inauspicious and unrelenting crush on her that started it all.

Having now lived twice the number of years I had then, I'm not sure I can claim any greater wisdom. Nowadays, a lot of the gusto of that time of my life seems smarter than where I am. Certainly not all of it, but much of it. Teenagers have an emotional sincerity from which we can always learn a little something. While age may not have increased my wisdom, distance has bettered my perspective.

I can see now that it was all a little funny and a little horrible, and even that those two aspects are usually paired up to some degree. I see past the imagined drama and the true consequences that it's a story about people who love each other. In fact, struggling through the melting, smeared mess of my memory of this event has helped me see myself a little clearer, even as the teenager I was, the woman who loved me, the girl who surprised me, our teachers and parents and friends of that time fall farther and farther away, into the distance, into tiny black specks.

Subterranean Design: Qanat Irrigation & Adventure

Hello, nerds!

Those Mexican qanats are
a bit out of controlsville.

All right, you're not all nerds. But if you have any interest at all in the subject to which I am about to link, you may be on the nerdlier side of the coin. I've finally gotten around to a writing assignment Friend Younce handed me back in the spring, and it's up at our joint venture, Subterranean Design. Qanat Irrigation & Adventure explores some of the more exciting design aspects of desert gravity-irrigation techniques.

Okay, I'm going to have to ask you to CALM. DOWN. Get ahold of yourself! It's actually far more interesting than I thought. On a related note: Hey, who's got two thumbs and is a raging nerd...?

Everything Under the Sun 3: Favorite Productions

Everything Under the Sun is a short series of posts we'll be doing here at the Aviary, motivated by a potential collaboration on a project that might end up being sort-of/kind-of personal. I have what amount to assignments of exploration of my own interests in particular areas, so I thought I'd put them out there to provoke any responses that you may find irresistible.

Favorite Productions

(With, it must be said, some apologies. Loving certain shows more than others does not decrease my love for said others. I love you both, all, in part and sum, uniquely, whoever you may be. If my choices here enrage you, you may want to evaluate the weight you give to my opinion, rather than my opinion itself.)

HIGH SCHOOL

Ten Little Indians

As my first show approaching any kind of production value, it's hard not to choose this one. However, I believe it ranks for more than just the thrill of beginning. With all the tumult and confusion of becoming a teenager, I still manage to understand that I found something thrilling and fulfilling about theatre with this show. Maybe the first hints at how a show and a role can be believed, rather than just enacted.

The Dining Room

Great play, to begin with. The production I was in was an abbreviated version and student-directed. I had given up theatre for a couple of years in high school (apart from an almost stunt-trick audition for Midsummer Night's Dream) and this production of Dining Room was something of a return. Because it was student-directed, I could engage in a real dialogue with the director about ideas and process. I remember it as a wonderful experience of how simple effective theatre can be (mar it as I'm sure I did with over-performing).

Illustration cropped from a work by Ted Michalowski.

COLLEGE

The Three Musketeers

This was only my second main-stage role in college, and I played d'Artagnon. If you'd asked me at the time, I never would have guessed this would be among my favorites. The production seemed to me to be plagued with indecision, uninspired writing and unbalanced trickery, plus I was naturally insecure about playing someone supposedly dashing and a fencer to boot when I hadn't even touched a foil before. Yet it set a lot in motion for me and introduced me to conventions I love to use to this day: live music, transforming set pieces and 3/4 staging. If it weren't for this production, I might not have ever gotten involved with physical theatre.

The Bacchae

Another student-directed production, this one was a graduate student assignment, and for about a month in our program just about every grad student was directing some undergrads in a Greek tragedy. Fun month, let me tell you. I played Pentheus, and had some good incentive at the time to explore unrepentant rage. The production was a relatively colloquial translation economized into a fluid one-act, and featured the gods Apollo and Dionysus seated on either side of the stage at the start. My destruction at the Bacchanalia was portrayed in a dance in which I was stripped just shy of naked and the women smeared stage blood all over my body. Later, when my mother awakes from her trance to realize she isn't holding a lion's head, but her sons, I walked slowly up behind her, stopping just at the point she sees that she's killed her son. It was an abstract, visceral and I think very effective production.

Hotel Paradiso

And now for something completely different. Hotel Paradiso was something of an adaptation of a translation of a French farce, directed by my favorite acting teacher. I'd previously played a lead role in a contemporary tragedy under his direction, but Hotel Paradiso's Maxime turned out to be a better fit for me. Essentially, I learned from this production that my sense of comedy had roots in traditional farce, and that the physical comedy I started with as a little kid could carry me into a great adult work. I simply had a blast feeling the symphony of a well-coordinated comic play.

Cropped from a photo by Jimmi Kilduff.

PROFESSIONAL

The Hatfields and the McCoys

Ridiculous. So ridiculous. Theatre West Virginia was my first professional contract, and it is a classic, outdoor, summer-stock theatre. They produce two standard shows every summer, and one change-up. The historically obligated show is Honey in the Rock, the story of West Virginia's secession from Virginia, and the real crowd-pleaser is The Hatfields and the McCoys. It's violent and sprawling and sad and funny by turns. In addition to running around a huge space, firing guns and wielding knives, I got to play dual roles as a McCoy in act one and a Hatfield in two and make them as physically broad as I liked. It was ridiculous fun.

The Glass Menagerie

For a little while, David Zarko wasn't sure if he hadn't miscast between myself and the actor playing Tom. In fact, I remember the common response I got when I mentioned I'd be appearing in The Glass Menagerie was, "Oh, you're perfect for Tom." It wasn't too long before David realized it was the best way to go, however, and I definitively agree. "The gentleman caller" surprised me with his depth, and his earnest insecurity. This show began my long collaboration with David and Electric Theatre Company (née The Northeast Theatre ["TNT/ETC"]), and was a beautifully simple and sensitive production.

Circus of Vices and Virtues

A raw space in a former bathhouse in Brooklyn. Self-generated work. Allegory and agit-prop. Clown and monsters, and lots of aerial acts. Pieter Bruegel the Elder and the second Bush era in government. I was young and passionately committed to any work, and the dark imagery and new, dance-like world of this most abstract show impressed me so much that I worked on it off and on over a course of two years.

Summertree

A Vietnam-War-era drama that plays loose with time, I got to play a young man at various stages in his life in Summertree until he ultimately dies, in the war and on stage. I loved the way this play had a clearer emotional through-line and cause-and-effect than a chronological approach, and though I know that ultimately I could've turned in a better performance I'm still proud of where I and the rest of the cast got with the material.

Plus they built a climbable tree with a swinging rope and an actual swing on stage, so you know I had some fun with all that.

One Perfect Rose

Pictured, clockwise: Melissa Riker, Leah
Abel, Bronwyn Sims, Jen Colasuonno &
yours truly.

Ah, One Perfect Rose! This was ostensibly a children's show, created by Kirkos - the circus-theatre troupe of which I was a founding member - and performed at the old Chashama home of The Bindlestiff Family Circus, on 42nd Street. It was a "fractured fairy-tales" story, with a different act/routine for each tale, hung on a somewhat chaotic framework that involved Snow White and Rose Red, Mother Goose and my character, a rather anal fellow named Phineas Grimm. I got to use direct address, do a bit of circus in a severe-yet-clownish sort of way, and even fell in love in the end (an ending I actually wrote myself). Bliss.

Silent Lives

Photo by Sally Wiener Grotta.

Some common themes here: self-generated work in a raw space, highly physical, and more than a little melancholy in-between moments of manic hilarity. This was also undeniably one of the most successful original shows created by my commedia dell'arte troupe, Zuppa del Giorno. The silent-film informed show was performed to live music and entirely without dialogue, and introduced me to two very influential mediums: clown work and the great silent comedy tradition.

Over the River and Through the Woods...

Compared with the rest of these productions, this probably wasn't as formative to my aesthetic, but it couldn't be more dear to me. An crowd-pleaser, we performed it every year for three years at TNT/ETC,  and it was in the third year that I reached the exact age of the character. It got to be hard not to think of  my fellow actors as my grandparents. It's strange to think I almost turned down this role - it had been suggested to the theatre by my Laura from Glass Menagerie for she and I, and they subsequently didn't cast her, plus I initially saw my character as a frustrating exercise in playing the frustrated straight man again. I was, of course, wrong. The show is hilarious, and there are moments I only have to think of playing that bring me to tears. And I'm still considering the final thoughts Nick shares with the audience.

The Very Nearly Perfect Comedy of Romeo and Juliet

Heather Stuart as
Juliet Capulet.

At some point, actors have to begin letting go of famous roles they didn't get to play before aging, and I had begrudgingly released Romeo before Zuppa del Giorno came up with this concept for tackling Shakespeare. In a world full of commedia-masked and grotesque characters, Romeo and Juliet are two red-nosed clowns who find one another. Somewhat amazingly, our concept worked quite well, I thought. It was a far-from-flawless production, but every piece of it found something profoundly good. And for me, there was something magical about playing young lovers once again with my long-time collaborator Heather Stuart, both of us older with the youthful permission of the clown nose.

The Spectacular Scrantonian Spectacular

Well, gosh. This wasn't even theatre, and I hardly performed in it. Somewhere between cabaret and vaudeville, TSSS was a little second-stage pet project of mine wherein I gathered some of my favorite performers from New York and Scranton to create a weird evening of variety in the same smaller ballroom in which Silent Lives was performed. It was all brought together over about 48 hours from start to finish, and was fun, pretty, and pretty funny.

I feel like I've gotten a lot of clarity about my tastes and influences by going through my resume like this. Please keep in mind both that there are shows I've participated and loved that didn't make it on to this list, and that this list is by no means about which ones have been influential. If either were qualifications, I'd have included shows such as As Far As We Know and Noble Aspirations. No, these are just favorites, and in spite of how much importance we place on that word growing up, it implies some malleability and prejudice. Perspective, in other words.