Setting Off Sparks

This really is a post for Portlanders, but, as it's about a cool, artistically oriented event, other folks with like minds might find it interesting (and you might try it in your burg).

Monday night (May 20th), Playwrights West, a group of professional playwrights (of which I'm a member) based in Portland, is throwing a party. Yes, it's a fundraiser for a full production of one of our playwright's works (Licking Batteries by the wonderful Ellen Margolis), but it's kind of turned into a celebration--a celebration of the joy of creating new work.

Dubbed Sparks, the evening features short pieces--either standalone short works or excerpts from longer works--from eight remarkable writers (and one bozo...me). It's what we have to offer...our words, and some terrific actors have signed on to breathe those words to into being. And since we're all getting together, there'll be food and drink and a silent auction and good vibes: what could best be described as a party.

Here's the fascinating thing to me, though. All of us in Playwrights West share a common purpose: to stage the new works of our members and to raise awaeness of the power and delight inherent in presenting premieres (and we're just lucky to have access to some killer scripts). All of us are professionals who have had our works staged in many forms and venues, and, frankly, we all can write. (Present company excepted...or at least tolerated.)

But, man, what a lot of different voices. All really original, and all coming at the work from different angles, bringing unique voices and sensibilities into play.

So what the folks who attend Sparks will be able to experience is a terrific mosaic of ideas, images, power, and, well, light from these eight writers (and the bozo). In one place, at one time (and only at this one time under the same tent). The works range from new projects, still in progress, to new works about to be born as fully realized productions, such as an excerpt from Andrea Stolowitz's Ithaka, which is about to open at Artists Repretory Theatre (where it won a commission), and, of course, Ellen's Licking Batteries--the play we're fully staging in August. And, if you drop by, you get to embrace these works--to celebrate their originality and diversity--with like-minded people...those who love new theatre. (You know who you are.)

Really, Sparks is a way to say: yes, new work counts. It keeps theatre alive, vibrant, surprising, ever changing. It's vital. It matters. And we can do it really, really well, right here in Portland. Oh yes, we can.

So drive, walk, take the streetcar, and come on down to CoHo Theatre on Monday night. Have some food and drink and laughs. Maybe try out a cool new outfit. And take what promises to be an unforgettable ride with eight splendid, absolutely kick-ass writers (and one bozo).

Details follow. See you there....

Steve

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Sparks: A Benefit Performance

By the writers of Playwrights West

Directed by Playwrights West Company Member Andrew Wardenaar

Date: Monday, May 20th

Time: Cocktail Hour & Silent Auction at 6 pm. Performance at 7 pm. Postshow reception at 8:30 pm.

Venue: CoHo Theatre (2257 NW Raleigh St)

Cost: $40; tickets online or at door (cash/check only) subject to availability. Seating is limited.

Purchase Tickets from: sparks.brownpapertickets.com

Playwrights West, a professional theatre company composed of nine acclaimed local playwrights, announces Sparks, its first-ever gala benefit performance. This performance will feature short excerpts of works by all nine member playwrights, culminating in a world premiere excerpt of Playwrights West’s upcoming 2013 season performance, Licking Batteries by Ellen Margolis. In addition to the performance, the evening will feature delicious food and wine and a silent auction.

Featuring excerpts from: Eating in the Dark by Debbie Lamedman; Consider the Ant by Karin Magaldi; Licking Batteries by Ellen Margolis; Bus Stop by Steve Patterson; Ithaka by Andrea Stolowitz (opening May 28th at Artists Repertory Theatre); Jeepers by Andrew Wardenaar; Where There Is Darkness, Light by Claire Willett; The Chain and the Gear by Patrick Wohlmut; and Forky by Matthew B. Zrebski.

Really...

...how can any self-respecting guitarist get by without one of these:

And then Huck said, "The walls keep melting, Aunt Polly."

I'm happy to report that Portland Theatre Works will present a public reading of my two-act play "Rimbaud's Daughter in Louisiana (Or the Drunken Pirogue)"...which has the honor of having the longest title I've ever come up with. It'll be Monday, April 15...details to come. And, lest you ask, it's free.

My longtime director pal Lisa Abbott calls the play "On the Verge" on drugs, but I prefer to think of it more as "Huck Finn" on acid...if Jim was a cynical Cajun woman and Huck was an insane French expatriate who's convinced she's Arthur Rimbaud's abandoned daughter.

Whichever, it's the first comedy I've ever written about symbolist poetry and the closing of American West. I know everyone else already has; so I'm catching up.

Many thanks to Portland Theatre Works for putting up with me again. The info's not on their Website yet, but I'm sure I'll be flogging it shamelessly.

Cheers,

Steve

You've Been Doing What?

It's been so long since I've posted, I feel like I'm at confessional.

But, really, it's not like I haven't been doing stuff. In fact, I have so many writing projects going that I'm drowning in them and can't keep track of them all...a couple play rewrites, the guitar book, research on a couple new plays ideas that are just terribly weird. Which all may be bad or good, I'm not sure. Either way, the ink's been flowing.

Of late, I've been writing long, narrative, free verse poems that may be.... Well, I'm not sure what they'll be. Poems or prose poems for literary magazines? Performance monologues? Some kind of concert/chorus reading with actors, music, multimedia, helicopter fly-bys? It's still in flux. But so far, there's 35 of them, so I'm going to have to do something with them.

And, just to prove it, here's one (still a rough), formatted to be read as a monologue. Or a prose poem. Or something. Whatever the hell it'll be, I'm having a great time. And that's good. Innnit it?


Mall
The weekend old cars, restored and polished, fill the mall. People passing see their reflections lengthen, distorted in lacquered, shining features. So far from the road. Like lobsters in dark tanks, white banded claws. A small PA plays Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, Eddie Cochrane. The latter clearly a bit of attention to period detail, or a vaguely subversive sense of humor. Hang out, maybe they’ll sneak in Iggy Pop’s “Lust for Life” as shoppers drift from temptation to temptation, purses and wallets pulsing cold blue, signs come and go, come and go. Half the shoppers seem to have just come from a board meeting, the others from a session of weight training or swimming, chlorine-scented hair.

Woman in a turquoise sheath dress, as though lost on the way home from church, sells ice cream bars from a yellow cart, a line of children waiting while their parents check email on smart phones. She wears flats with discreet orthopedic wedges, the days on her weary feet, patiently waiting for their nightly soak as their owner rocks the remote

Little girl, dressed in some combination of cultures, little black zip-up coat, running shorts and saddle shoes, concentrates deeply when presented with choices. Very serious, this one. Asking questions regarding the nature of chocolate, hard or creamy, plain or French vanilla, her mother finally making a decision, which the girl accepts so readily that one wonders if that wasn’t what she wanted after all. Not knowing there’s a good chance that someday the roles would reverse

She sees them all, the impossibly nice or difficult—sometimes the same couple. But largely, a swath of the utterly ordinary, who, in her younger days, when her hair was long and straight, and she wore vests that jingled, she would have labeled plastic people. She saw them now as the shipwrecked, thrashing for their life preservers, waiting for anything to rescue them.

Above her, banks of tube lights behind translucent colored screens shone in alternating bands of color, pointing to an artificially vanishing horizon: a mural of land and sea, right out of the renaissance. The rest dark wood and painted fiberboard, disguising the mall’s warehouse like bones. And she wonders how they came to choose the painting, how they decided the sea would lead to higher consumption levels, for nothing here had been left to chance, every shine or surface carefully imagined.

At the end of days, after giving her feet their well-earned treat, she sits in her deliberately wild garden, watching sparrows and finches fight at the feeder until the night comes, city lights painting cloud bellies a dull magenta. And then the sirens sing.

Through the Scope

My dad passed away back in the 90s, and, then, about six years ago, my mom became too infirm to live by herself, and I bundled her up and moved her to Portland. She died five years ago, this evening.

Naturally, I miss her. Every day. In her prime, she was a force of nature. But last Friday night, for the first time ever, I felt relieved she was gone, because, above nearly all things, she loved children, and what happened back in Newtown, Connecticut, would have truly crushed her.

When I went through the frankly wrenching experience of packing up her stuff and selling the homestead, one of my chief concerns was securing my dad's guns. He'd been an armorer during World War II, and, though he hated war, he retained a fondness for firearms. Cleaning rods and polishing oil lived in his dresser drawer. Out in the country, it was no big deal to take a summer afternoon, line some tin cans up against a hill, and test your skill. Flat out, it was fun, and it was something dad and I did together, knocking off a lot of tin and brass, and having a wonderful time. First off, though, he drilled safety into my head, and made sure I knew the difference between a real gun and the stuff we see on television. Around our house, carrying a gun in a careless manner was a serious offense.

So, when I was cleaning up the house, I made sure I found all five firearms, secured them, and, at home, tucked them into the back of a closet, where I pretty much forgot about them, until my wife told me, honestly, about how uneasy having them made her feel. It took me a little time to wrap my head around it, but, when local gun shops expressed no interest in them--they were neither rare or valuable, I gave them up when the police had one of their regular gun turn-in events.

It was easy. A form to sign. The policeman and I chatted a bit about the pieces, their history and so on, they way guys talk about cars or sports or guitars, and we both took time to admire the old double-barrel shotgun with twin triggers. Then it was done, and we drove away. And it felt like I'd been kicked in the stomach.

Not that I give a damn about having guns: I'll be perfectly fine if I never shoot another one in my life. But the tie to my dad was so strong, that it felt like saying goodbye to him all over again. That's part of the mythos that surrounds firearms, particularly for men, and one reason why people become so attached to them. No matter how sane, pacifistic, and level-headed one is, that's a dark little hunk of history in your hand. And it's seductive.

But I when came to the end of last Friday, if there was anything positive I could salvage from, basically, one of the worst days in America, it was that those guns were gone, and they could never end up in the hands of someone with the circuitry slowly frying in his head. In short, they'd never hurt anybody. And, you know, they never did.

Sometimes, when the myths grow too dangerous and powerful, it's time to retire those myths. Time to choose a civil society over fear. Time to grow up.

So...where's my virtual theatre?

It's weird...I've been thinking about this for years, but I've still yet to see it. Maybe the tech isn't there yet. But....

We have all these wonderful small theatres, scattered from Portland to Cairo, Mumbai to Osaka, doing scrappy, crazy new work, and fighting to pull in, say, 100 people a night. Virtual reality kind of raised its weird, pseudo-immersive head for awhile, got everyone excited, then...faded away. So...what?

So, wouldn't it be great if you could set up a multiple camera rig, shoot small plays completely live, and sell tickets for viewers through the Internet? Not for a tape of something (or a clip on youtube), but a piece that viewers can only see live, streaming, as it happens, and, in doing so, essentially widen edgy theatre's breadth?

I mean, they have deals where, you know, Royal Shakespeare or symphony performances are shown in movie houses. But I'm thinking the equivalent of Netflix streaming, except it has to happen live. It wouldn't be the same experience as sitting in a theatre, of course, with an actor practically sweating on you. But what an intriguing idea for taking, say, something completely experimental, and extending it's range far beyond some tiny theatre tucked into some industrial wasteland, where you have to beg all your friends to venture into the night. And then you get killed by an ice storm.

I suppose it's the equivalent of "where's my flying car"...but the idea still fascinates me. Out of all the people the Internet can reach, it seems like there must be a way to pull in more than...100 folks a night. And scale the ticket price down to a level where someone (or a couple thousand someones) might pony up a couple bucks simply out of curiosity. As it is, little theatres often gamble with sliding scale just to get bodies in the seats. You figure out the price point for renting the gear, achieving the bandwidth, and see if there's a point where, hell, a viewer pays $2 or $3 bucks to participate in something that will never happen again the same way...which is part of theatre's magic. I mean, just between Facebook and Twitter, how many potenital viewers could you reach?

Eh...whatever. I'm out of the producing biz these days anyway, focusing on writing plays, but that "virtual theatre" idea has haunted me for a decade or more. So...here I am, throwing it out for...whatever reason. I guess because it's been bugging me. It's probably stupid and impossible and all that...but working insanely hard for nothing to create an evening of...experience...of something that can only happen once...is that any less stupid or impossible?

It sure is fun, or else we wouldn't keep doing it.

Instant Karma

Brooding Works Wonders

So I write a piece about the ups and downs of the writing life--receiving rejections, specifically--so naturally, I received a clutch of mondo cool theatres (which shall remain nameless unless some great happens) asking to see my work. Never fails (except when it does).

Also in the Department of Great Things, I just got word that "The Centering," a one-man show I wrote with Portland actor extraordinaire Chris Harder, gets a two-week extension at CoHo Theatre after a three-week stand at Portland's Shoebox Theatre...and to top it off, The Oregonian gives it the kind of review that goes down like a hot buttered rum on a freezing day:

'The Centering' gets additional two-week run at CoHo Theater

Maybe I should whine more often.