GRAD SCHOOL NEWS

ALAS!

I was not accepted into Brown's Literary Arts graduate program. This was to be expected. I think I would have to be some sort of playwriting savant in order to get into a program like Brown right after undergrad. The only sad part to this whole story is that I won't get to have two easy years of writing and teaching anytime soon. I didn't have my hopes up to get accepted, but if I had one flight of fancy it was over the possibility of TAing a playwright's workshop for a bunch of talented undergrads. Perhaps this is a sign from the cosmics that I'm not quite ripe yet. Or perhaps, instead, graduate school is not right for me, and I should just go out there and put work up somehow on my own. In any case this short stack chips on my side of the poker table isn't getting me down.

HUZZAH!

There's a whole world of oppertunity open to me now. I have the energy and the ardor to go out there and make a mark on the world, and I never really needed a graduate program to make that happened. Now is my chance to be young, green, naive and brave, and I'm going enter a prolific period of writing no matter where I end up. All I need is a home, a place filled with friends and collaborators who want to change the world. Besides, I learn best when I do it myself.

Now if I could just find a job...

NYC2k6 II

Saw ZOMBOID! Very cool, as I now assume that all Richard Foreman plays are. Still, a bit of a let down from The Gods Are Pounding My Head. That show still has me reeling. The Film/video project was interesting nonetheless, and the cast did a great job of being strange.
Suppose I were to postulate...that theatre can be unintelligeably intelligeable?

Saw Carl perform with Braxton's ensemble. Fucking phenomenal. 13 players, 36 instruments. More on that in the next entry.

Most importantly...
...SAW EVAN MAZUNIK! That man is sooooooo supergroovy! I gave him a big hug. God, I need to do some soundpainting again. Maybe that's what's been missing in my life these past few years.

More entries soon. Hopefully I will have grad school news as well.

NYC2K6

Saw "The Hills Have Eyes". Scary scary scary. Good good good. Not as good as Haute Tension though.

Saw Entertaining Mr. Sloane. Everyone was awesome except for Mr. Sloane. Must read some more Joe Orton. Alec Baldwin was unexpectedly stageworthy.

Saw Sweeney Todd. Ten actors. No orchestra. New arrangement. Sweet set design. Awesome acting. Damn solid production. Although I usually loathe musicals, I dream of working on a show like this in some capacity. Probably the best thing I've had a chance to see on Broadway. This, of course, is tempered by the fact that I've only seen four plays on broadway now. Coincidentally, I saw Democracy in the same theatre.

Saw The Emperor Jones. Damn. By far the bravest peice of theatre I've seen in a long while. Kate Valk played the title character in blackface. I think that O'Neil is rather irrelevant today, but this production made his confusing and racist play worth seeing.

This trip to NYC has thus far been discombobulating, but worth it. Although there was more safety, comfort and rest in the last trip, I like this one better.

A dream deferred

I have never been more disappointed in my life. I rarely feel disappointed, if ever, so this by far takes the cake.
A bunch of us University of Iowa playwrights got free tickets to see two shows at Steppenwolf Theatre. I was really excited for the first one, "A Well Appointed Room," because the director for the Puzzle Locker was involved with its development. The second show, The Pajama Men, was getting truly decent reviews. I haven't seen a show at Steppenwolf since my first one, which was the absolutely unforgettable production of "One Flew Over The Cukoo's Nest." Seriously, one of the defining theatre experiences of my life. Needless to say, I had really high expectations for these shows.
So we see A.W.A.R.. My god, I just realized what the show's title was an acronym for. This fact will become more significant in a moment. Anyway, the set was posh, if a little too cinematic. The acting was really strong. The performances were clear and well done. The rhetoric of the play was impeccable. But the play itself was completely irrelevant. It was all about rich white people, with impossibly eloquent dialects and high opinions of theatre. Two one acts. Both were extremely mysogenistic. The first was disturbingly violent (verbally, not phyically). What's worse is that the plays were "tied" to 9/11, and it had absolutely nothing significant to say about the event. Instead, the play used terrorism and war to define a battle of the sexes. It was all some stupid academic excersize in the way the whole trauma has "affected" our sense of time. Bullshit. ARGH! I am extremely aggrivated!
Why was this play made? Why do we keep portraying ourselves as utter victims? Haven't we taken care of our victimization? Isn't that what this whole war-vendetta was about? I'm sick and fucking tired of all this violence...
Anyway, we were all invited to this meet and greet afterwards. I didn't want to be impolite, so I figured I should at least poke my head in. The whole event turned into a coporate petting zoo, with some lady from fidelity mutual investments talking to us about how "we could all still have a future in the corporate world" and blah blah blah. The whole meet and greet was the worse peice of theatre I've ever seen. They took pictures of everyone, and I feel used.
I hate that this theatre was wasting its time stroking its investors. If they produce good work, they shouldnt need to do that shit. Theoretically, if they stayed at all relevant, then they wouldn't have to worry about what fidelity investments thought, or whether or not their investors felt thanked. Boo! Boo Steppenwolf! I really wanted to work there some day. They have a sweet internship, but now I see why its so well funded. Could I ever be OK with working in a place like that? GAH! The Associate Artistic Director was such a shill for the man.
I understand that theatres need investors, and that it's almost impossible to function without them. Steppenwolf is a non-for-profit, so I guess I just expected more out of them. Can't they just find private donors without a stake in getting their name attatched to good art? Not that A Well Appointed room was good art. It was good acting. It was terribly unimportant writing.
MAKE CHANGE IN THE WORLD!
DO SOMETHING GOOD FOR ALL HUMAN KIND!
DON'T FEED US THIS GARBAGE ABOUT YUPPIES AND THEIR PROBLEMS!
That's all my complaining for now. I had a really crappy night. I feel like I majorly screwed up somehow. Not all that abnormal.
I promise I'll start writing about the DTAT project tomorrow, once I collect my thoughts. After that, I'm off to New York.

Idea For A Play II

In the Javahouse, a young disgruntled student attending the University of Iowa is not doing his homework right now. Instead, he is working on his blog, thinking up an idea for a new full length play, wondering whether or not he is going to graduate school in the fall. His playwright SIgnificant OTHer has just left to go to spanish class, but the two have just spent the past hour online looking at trivia for AMADEUS on IMDb. This, along with the fact that his SIGOTH brought up the play MARAT/SADE, has caused the disgruntled to think about an old germ a play formula. It reads as follows...

We open on an old sailing vessel, a maze of ropes, a web of fabric sails, a team of ragged expatriated travelers caught in the tropical doldrums. All aboard are doomed for lack of water or food, the audience included. The last survivors, led by a plucky heroine, decide not to die in misery, but instead to pass their remaining time in pantomime. They put on a play to tell their story.

Their tale is a picaresque, and their lives are tangled together in a strange fantasy. Heroes and Villains, lovers and fighters, povery and great riches. Every element of the play tells its own story, and all of those stories contribute to a final message:

If there's one thing we must all understand,
do not take for granted a life on land.

The ultimate theme: make change in your own world. Don't run away from or ignore society's problems. Don't expatriate when you could start a revolution. WAKE UP! DO SOMETHING! Otherwise we're all lost at sea...

...The disgruntled student thinks about titling the play "Life on Land." He also thinks that this is a corny idea for a play. "So what?" He thinks, "I'm from the midwest. Corn is our staple crop!"

Heyooooo

LONG TIME NO SEE

A GREAT DEAL HAS HAPPENED SINCE MY LAST BLOG ENTRY.

OK. FOISTLY...

Sorry I haven't been so attentive with the blog lately. I promise it was only a momentary lapse, and it shall not be repeated. Things have been incredibly busy with the PUZZLE LOCKER, which you should see because it's AWESOME. Never again will I allow myself to simultaneously sound design, compose music for and act in the same play. TOO MUCH STRESS! I promise, once this play is complete I will elucidate all the major issues that have gone wrong with the process of making this play as AWESOME as it is. They mostly involve a drug-addled sound/video designer who failed to do his well-paid job and my own insane dedication to this production. So, see future entries for P-Locker stories.

SECONDILLY

I AM IN LOVE AGAIN. HA! I said it. It's true. She's amazing. No more on that.

THIRDILLY

DTAT. INTERNATIONAL ISSUES PLAY. BIG DEAL. MY NEXT BUNCH OF BLOG ENTRIES ARE GOING TO BE DEDICATED TO THE PROCESS BY WHICH WE CONJUR UP THIS PEICE. WHY AM I WRITING IN ALL CAPS? That's better. So, anyway, that's the big news. temporarily this blog will also become a vehicle for distributing DTAT's collaboration process to all you fine young canibals out there. I promise the play will be AWSOME!

GOOD MORROW!