Open Wardrobes

Over the past couple of months I've been sending out emails to community and children's theaters in Minnesota and neighboring states, searching for an initial production for The Princess and the Moon. I've had some nibbles and several companies interested in reading the script and others who weren't. And then, a couple days ago, finally, a bite. I had an email from the program manager at Shade Tree Players Children's Theatre in Bismark, ND saying that they wanted to do The Princess and the Moon as one of their productions this summer. Shade Tree does a number of shows over the summer and their focus is plays performed by kids and teens (similar to Lakeshore's Summer Youth Project). I'm planning to drive out there for a few days to catch the show. So, it's exciting to finally have someone interested in doing this play and I look forward to seeing it!

On Sunday morning, before I had to head off for my Sunday matinee of Doubt, Kelly and I decided to go sit at a coffee shop for a bit. We tried a new place here in Saint Paul, on Payne Avenue, called Polly's Coffee Cove. We soon realized this was the neighborhood spot - everyone else seemed to know everyone else. It was a nice spot. Kelly did some reading while I continued and finished the first draft of my commedia piece (still needs a good title, hmmmm...). I'm shooting for something around an hour and this looks so far to be more, so that gives me some room to trim (or perhaps shoot for a 75-minute piece?). I was surprised at how quickly the draft went (23 days), but it helped a great deal that I had a detailed outline drawn up before I sat down and started writing. I mentioned in an earlier post that I did this to try and more closely follow the style of the true commedia, where the actors would post a detailed scenario (showing the scenes and entrances and exits) and improv the show from there. I don't normally do an outline when starting a new play and so it made for a fun change of pace for me. And seeing how quickly the draft went once I had the outline, I see the benefit of it! The Playwright Purge (i.e. write something everyday for 30 days) I'm participating in finishes up next week, and so I've started chipping away again at an Adaptation I'm working on to round out the Purge, and then will start looking at revisions of the commedia piece once I've typed the rest of it up. On the Adaptation I'm in the middle of a bit with an interesting technical challenge - how do you portray giants on stage when they need to interact with normal-sized characters?

Yesterday afternoon, before heading off to my own performance, Kelly and I went to see The Mousetrap at Lyric Arts. I've seen the play a couple of times before (including the long-running production in London), but not for many years and Kelly hadn't see it at all. It's the first time I've seen Lyric's space. It's a great theater and the beautiful set fit in perfectly (I wasn't always sure where the set ended and the theater itself began). Overall this cast of 8 was strong. Rachel Weber was a highlight with her reserved and inscrutable Miss Casewell, as was Ron Tolliver with his genial Major Metcalf. Joe Hendren gave a solid performance as Sergeant Trotter as he tries to unravel the mystery despite the lack of cooperation among the guests. Mary Kay Fortier-Spalding was also a delight with her hard-to-please Miss Boyle. Allie Munson was nice, if busy, as Molly Ralston and she made a good pairing with Toby Rust as her husband Giles. I found Tim Gage's Christopher Wren a little over the top, and Keith Wynecoop's Paravicini was sadly lacking any sense of mystery.


While a long production (a good 2 1/2 hours or so, including intermission) it did not feel slow-paced and Christie's wonderful script keeps the audience engaged throughout. The show runs for one last weekend (January 28 - 31) with evening shows on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, and matinees on Saturday and Sunday. Definitely a good opportunity to catch a classic. 4 out of 5 stars.

With the first weekend of Doubt over, I've had several days off which has given me time to work on the commedia dell'arte piece. Kelly and I spent Monday afternoon (off from work for Martin Luther King Day) at the Tea Source, as usual one of our favorite writing hangouts (with some great baked goods from La Patisserie in addition to the wonderful tea). I spent several hours working on the commedia piece which is nearing its climax. Commedia scenarios were often very complex, and so I've been trying to work in as many different threads as I can. The challenge of course is to get them to all come together in the end. I went on for several pages with one false start on Monday before I found the right direction for the scene I'm working on. Sometimes seeing a few wrong ways for a scene to go helps me identify the right way. It's been interesting working on a piece like this where the characters, after a fashion, are pre-exisiting. I want to give them my own flavor, but the general outlines have been around for centuries, I'm just coloring them in a little as I'm sure the actors of the original commedia all did. It's a good example of how sometimes having set factors in a piece can help. Staying as true to commedia conventions as I can has actually helped spur this piece along. Having certain parameters to work within has freed me to focus on the story. I've been participating this month in the Playwrights' Purge, a companion to the Binge, where you write something, anything, every day for 30 days. This has been my project and having that extra impetus to be writing every day has been helpful. We're about halfway through the Purge right now and I have a rough draft nearly complete! At this point my only concern about the Purge is what to work on once the rough draft of the commedia is done. That's a good feeling.

The writing life is filled with them. At last night's wonderful opening for Doubt I was talking with our director Kevin T. Houle about the 10-minute play festival that Lakeshore does each spring and that I had a script entered. If it made it in, he wanted to direct it, sight unseen. That was incredibly flattering and made me want all the more for Circus of Fate to make it. Today they announced the semi-finalists: I was not one of them. Both of the other times I've submitted I at least made it that far. This script is better than either of them, and it didn't make it. Why? Who can say. The scripts are blind for this first round and so it had to stand on its own. Why they didn't like it, I don't know, but I find it incredibly disappointing. Maybe next year.

After a week of tech and dress rehearsals we opened Doubt last night to a full crowd. The performance went great and it was nice to at last perform for more than an empty theater. :-D The audience was very responsive and found much of the show much funnier than we expected, but those surprise reactions are always fun. Sister Aloysius was a bit hit (the audience clearly loved to hate to her!) and the Father O'Rourke speech went over really well too. It's just such a solid cast and they have all been a pleasure and joy to work with. I'm looking forward to the rest of the run! For all the details visit the Lakeshore Players website. I hope to see you at the show!

I am been very remiss in blogging about Doubt rehearsals (which you should of course come and see; details here). We started rehearsals nearly a month ago, which has flown by! We did have a week break in there for Christmas which gave us all a nice chunk of time to work on lines. It's a tough show, no doubt about it (no pun intended), but that's what makes it so satisfying as an actor. With just a cast of four the show will ultimately rise or fall on us. We have a fantastic director (Kevin T. Houle) who is helping us all dig deeper and deeper into this piece, not to mention one of the best stage managers I've worked with (Sue Kuta) who I know will keep things running extremely smoothly, but in the end we four actors have to sustain an hour and a half of thought-provoking drama on our own. It has been a daunting task, as least I've found it to be so, and a ton of work. When so many people have at least seen the movie version, how do you break people's preconceived notions of this play? How do you keep the characters interesting and dynamic above and beyond the concepts being wrestled with? If they are not, the show becomes merely pedantic and the characters two-dimensional mouthpieces.


This at least is a taste of what I've been wrestling with. As Kevin has pointed out many times, this plays is most definitely NOT about whether or not Father Flynn did it. One of my challenges has been to not make that question too easy, to give the audience doubt about what my character may or may not be capable of. We have just under two weeks to go and we are definitely getting there. We have a great cast and I've been enjoying working with them on this. I'm excited for performances and to see what the audiences have to say.


But a New Year would not be complete without a new writing project. November of course was spent in NaNoWriMo, and December brought with it the start of rehearsals and Christmas, but during my break I've finally found some traction on a new project. My friend Brian teaches middle school theater in Georgia and awhile back we had talked about the idea of me writing a short show that he could use as scenes in class. Brian has build a small stage in his classroom (beyond acting he is an accomplished designer) and a flexible set comprised of many doors. We talked about writing something in the commedia dell'arte style, as we both though it would work well with minimal set and the stock characters would give his students s starting place. At the time I was knee-deep in writing the Fringe show, and so while I loved the idea it had to sit on the back burner for awhile.


But over the past few weeks I finally started doing some research on the commedia characters and over the last week started writing a scenario. As the original commedia was all improvised, the actors would choose a scenario for a performance that detailed the entrances and exits and gave the general gist of the plot. From there the performers, who each specialized in one stock character, would create the show on the fly. Later on playwrights such as Goldoni wrote full plays using the commedia characters and style and this was my goal as well. I don't normally start plays with a detailed outline, but in this case I wanted to create such a scenario first in order to replicate the commedia process as much as possible. And so, now having such a scenario in hand I have now started in on the writing process and shall see where it goes.