writing.performance

In a week I head to San Francisco, where my play Trojan Barbie has a week’s rehearsal/ experiment concluding in 2 staged readings. It’s for Cutting Ball’s Risk Is This festival, which also features Marcus Gardley’s beautiful play, and jesus moonwalks the mississippi. Mei Ann Teo, who hails from the Southern hemisphere like me (she’s Singaporean, I’m Australian) will direct. I couldn’t be more excited to work with Cutting Ball, whose experimental approach and stage aesthetic I’ve long admired. (Cutting Ball A.D. Rob Melrose’s adaptation/ direction of the Scottish play remains one of the theatre highlights of my last few years’ viewing.) I like the fact that Cutting Ball bring in designers as well to dream up the “what if” of the play and think in space, rather than only progressing in a workmanlike manner towards that strange and unsatisfying hybrid–the staged reading–a life form that sits weirdly between theatre and market testing.

the bitter-sweetness of closing a show— we had a full house and a very appreciative audience– a good show–and then the strange experience of the audience leaving and the crew striking the set. Within about 30 minutes the grey shrink-wrapped strange world of Weightless had peeled away to hardboard and old sheets of plastic. It’s now gone, and I wonder if this play will see the light of the stage again. It may, but it will be another incarnation. That particular world is gone. No wonder theatre folks prop up bars all over the country.

Now maybe I’ll write about other things again.

this is nice…a glowing review in the Brown post for Weightless… read it here

We have full houses for our last weekend; that’s wonderful! Proof that non-naturalistic theatre can interest a local small town audience. I’m really happy with how this show has gone. And yet—other playwrights I’m sure can relate—it’s a strange, almost out-of-body experience to watch your own play. It’s like waking up inside your own dream, but someone else is having it.

Another Weightless review— you can read it here.

I sometimes wonder how Beckett or Ionesco or for that matter, Sarah Kane or Howard Barker would have fared trying to start their careers in the American theatre. From the responses of many reviewers to anything but what Mac Wellman calls the “American well-made” (referencing the deathly Scribe of 19th century France famous for wooden and formulaic “well-made” plays—hugely successful by the way) you wouldn’t think that there was already a long tradition of non-realist theatre in this country. (more…)

Mark Turek has just posted some beautiful images of the show on Flickr—

you can see them here.

IN the second week of the run, I’m reflecting on how vital productions are for playwrights. It’s very curious: you wouldn’t sell a car without road-testing it under real conditions. You wouldn’t give a builder a license without letting them actually put bricks together and work in the field. You wouldn’t consider a composer trained if they’d only worked from the written page. Cooks don’t just memorize recipes. Actors don’t learn their craft without an audience. (more…)