Sands UK Tour, Day Six: London to Lincoln

Ten years ago this month, the Stillbirth and Neonatal Death Charity (SANDS UK) sent my solo performance I Hate This (a play without the baby) on a seven date tour of Great Britain.

Wednesday, 13 June 2007

Royal College of Physicians

We caught the 5:50 out of King's Cross on our way to Lincoln, and I am writing this on the train.

Yesterday started well enough, with a well-anticipated 5 mile run. Things quickly soured as the getting-out-the-door ritual was unfortunately stressful. I was exhausted and highly anxious about the performance at the Royal College of Physicians. But parenthood took precedence and we took the children to Coram's Fields.

Coram's Field is a lovely playground with expansive sandboxes for the toddlers, a wide variety of climbing contraptions, and even game captains to lead older children in more advanced play. It was formerly the site of the Foundling Hospital. The bad historical ju-ju, coupled with the sight of my own children playing without a care in the world made something inside of me crumble and I just had to sit and stare.

We arrived at the RCP in plenty of time to set everything up ... including a lovely, wooden rocking chair. I didn't want to get into it with anyone, I was about to collapse. I realized I hadn't had anything for lunch, so my stage manager and I breezed into the crowded hall where the food was, avoiding eye contact with absolutely everyone, loaded up a small plate, snatching an apple, a hunk of cheese, and bunch of grapes, and escaping back to the little room to the side of the stage.

There was a couch, some chairs, a table. I ate and whined about my life as my stage manager listened patiently, and then went out to get everything arranged on stage and in the booth.

A large painting, a portrait, of Edward VII hung on the wall. He looked like my Dad, except for the suit.

Panel discussion

I had never been so unsure of myself before a performance. And this wasn't even such an unusual event, but I was so shaken, exhausted, overwhelmed and unhappy, I had no idea how I was going to be able to do this. My wife came backstage and we talked. I just resigned myself to my fate, the show would go on, of course. I just hoped it wasn't terribly awful.

The music started and I stepped out and did something I never did before. The lights were on full, and I took my time walking to my place in the center of the stage. I usually just keep my eye on that spot, move to it, and look at my hands. This day I looked at everything. The table, the phone, the stepladder, I turned to look at the rocking chair. I took in this room of memories. It gave me confidence.

The room was a lecture hall, maybe three hundred seats, with an estimated 170 attendants, but they were spread evenly throughout the seats. The seats were steeply raked. I was mic'ed,  and when the opening music faded, I looked up and said, "WHAT?"

I surprised myself, and everyone else, by the volume. Good start, though.

And it was a good show, craning my neck up to the top, taking in the entire audience. Why has it taken five years to become so comfortable with this play? It's like something new, I am looking at the audience, not over them. I feel I am talking to them, not performing for them.

It was warm in there, some people were slouching a bit in their seats, but I didn't mind. The show was working. There were groans, laughs. The British jokes work.

After a short break for coffee, there was a panel discussion about the entire conference, and Toni participated in that. After we stayed and shook hands with a number of folks, including some young couples - two couples each lost a child just this past November. They all impressed me with the way they had already incorporated their children into their lives, though they all had stories about how difficult some family member was being in acknowledging their lost babies.

The rocking chair thing, it turned out, was simply a last-minute error. The chair that they did in fact have at the SANDS office has recently been picked up, unbeknownst to those who knew they still needed it. Just a miscommunication.

Got my brother a shirt!

For dinner we joined my brother and his family at a Giraffe close to our hotel. I was practically brainless, but the cocktails were scrumptious and I did my best to be personable. However, this five mile-running, nervous breakdown-having, solo performance-acting twit was not through yet. I felt I had earned some joy, and so I left bedtime to the wife, and went out pub-hopping with y stage manager and sister-in-law. The pints were tasty, the conversation was blue, and I went to bed shortly before 1:00 AM.

Today was spent leisurely in Regent's Park. My in-laws set off on their own the explore Westminster Abbey, and the rest of us just strolled through the park, paddled out on the pond to get a closer look at the baby birds, and took a nap under the trees.

Original blog post: June 13, 2007

Sands UK Tour, Day Five: London

Ten years ago this month, the Stillbirth and Neonatal Death Charity (SANDS UK) sent my solo performance I Hate This (a play without the baby) on a seven date tour of Great Britain.

Tuesday, 12 June 2007

We were up last night until about 1 am. There so many reasons not to take a run today, but one too few, apparently.

My route took me down Euston to Regent's Park, down to and around the London Zoo and back. It was lovely and I was in no hurry. I have gotten a bit out of shape, however, and was a little hot and weary.

City running is very odd. But there are an awful lot of runners in central London. I stepped out of my hotel in time to catch a man and a woman going my direction, which was helpful, as I followed their lead down the city street, watching where they looked, and where on the pavement they kept their path. Not that there's much of a science to it, we're all salmon swimming upstream, dodging cars, people and other obstacles until we reach THE PARK. Returning, after seven on a Tuesday, I was like those folks yesterday in St. James, saying "excuse me" and trying not to get struck by a street sweeper.

Last night the children were left in the care of the in-laws so that our stage manager the wife, and I could steal off and see The Merchant of Venice at Shakespeare's Globe. I have only seen one other performance there, the "Fancy Dress Party Macbeth" which remains the best production of the Scottish Play I've ever seen.

For this production of Merchant, instead of rationalizing that WS was some kind of forward thinking egalitarian (he wasn't) they chose the other route, which was to make almost everyone else grotesque, too. Shylock is an evil, hunched, bearded, withered old Jew, played by John McEnery, the guy who played Mercutio in Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet the year I was born. The Duke of Morocco was a grinning, strutting, stuffed-codpiece jutting cartoon of an African, the Spaniard an English-mangling braggart, and they even managed to squeeze in a joke at the French where one doesn't exist.

As for the English, Christian characters, the masquing scene featured what could be construed as a Black Mass, though really it was more like a bunch of frat boys dressed as priests and bishops and popes in devils' masks, performing an obscene marriage. They profess Christianity, but flagrantly ridicule its leaders.

They mock the trappings of Christianity - Catholicism, to be precise - but hypocritically espouse a pure love for Christ. One of the funniest moments in the play is when Antonio insists Shylock must be made to convert. To Antonio it isn't a punishment (it wouldn't have been to Shakespeare, nor his audience) but a blessing. However, the look on Shylock's face can't be described. It was hilarious. And that's offensive. And I laughed really loud and I don't feel bad about that.

The one stereotype that remained unsatirised was that of the homosexual Antonio, and his affection for Bassanio. In a play with such obvious mockery, for everyone, that minority alone was treated with subtlety and respect. And that's a double-standard. I found this omission confusing.

I am not suggesting they should have had a mincing Antonio. But if the Duke of Morocco is made to look and behave like a cartoon Muhammad Ali, Antonio seemed like he was in a different production.

Big ups to Kristy Besterman and Pippa Nixon, who had to step up from (respectively) the roles of Nerissa and Jessica to the roles of Portia and Nerissa (with Ms. Nixon doubling in her usual role of Jessica) with book in hand to cover for the woman usually playing Portia. The book-in-hand thing was distracting for about two seconds as Ms. Besterman did know and awful lot of the part and was very good in the role.

God bless the understudies, without them we'd all have to go home.

Original blog posts
I Hate This Blog, June 12, 2007
Daddy Runs Fast, June 12, 2007

Sands UK Tour, Day Four: London

Ten years ago this month, the Stillbirth and Neonatal Death Charity (SANDS UK) sent my solo performance I Hate This (a play without the baby) on a seven date tour of Great Britain.

Monday, 11 June 2007

The London Eye

It was a long day yesterday, taking the train from Carlisle to London. We were taking a first class coach, and lucky me, I got the odd single seat a few rows up from everyone else. I read and dozed on and off for four hours. They do have an awful lot of sheep here.

The sheer excitement of being on a train eventually wore off for the kids, and the girl simply could not get comfortable or get to sleep. Hideous breakdown in King's Cross.

The wife, as ever, finds the best places to eat. We took a great early evening walk through Bloomsbury to Abeno, a Japanese place that specializes in egg pancakes called okonomiyaki, which they cook in front of you on the table. Big metal hot plates in front of my kids make me very, very nervous. So I drank a lot of sake.

This morning we led my sister- and mother-in-law on "the basics" tour of London. Yes, there was a ride on a double-decker bus, and a trip around the Eye.

That's my third go-round on the London Eye. I almost pulled a Dad and told the wife they could go, and I'd stick my nose in Foyles for a half-hour, but I didn't. There will be no fourth trip on the London Eye for me, even if someone puts a gun to my head.

A walk past Buckingham to St. James Park, where we got sandwiches and camped by the river where my wife can make those noises she makes when she sees water fowl. The kids got very excited by chasing pigeons, but I didn't think they'd catch one.

St. James Park

Our contact from SANDS met us back at the hotel before three to walk our stage manager and I to the Royal College of Physicians so we could tech the show. The auditorium we will be using is quite big, and they hope it may be two-thirds full. The acoustics are super, but the lights aren't really made for performance, it will be a number overlapping spots. The screen is possibly the biggest I've worked with and that's saying a lot.

I was surprised to hear there wouldn't be a rocking chair. Someone decided we didn't need one, that I could just use an office chair with a sheet thrown over it.

Hmn. Have you seen the show?

I insisted that we need the rocking chair. Any rocking chair, but a real one, one that rocks.

It's a simple show. I don't ask for much. Except the rocking chair.

Original blog post: June 11, 2007

Sands UK Tour, Day Three: Carlisle to London

Ten years ago this month, the Stillbirth and Neonatal Death Charity (SANDS UK) sent my solo performance I Hate This (a play without the baby) on a seven date tour of Great Britain.

Sunday, 10 June 2007

The performance at St. Cuthbert's couldn't have gone smoother. I have been touring I Hate This since 2003. To cut down on expenses, I have always requested that each site provide their own rocking chair, even if I bring everything else. As a result, it's always exciting to see what the chair is going to look like. Carlisle set the record for "Shortest Rocking Chair Ever," but it sure was cute.

Friday my biggest concern was the screen. The projector was no problem but there was no blank wall to cast them on. Our contact tried very hard to find one and came up short. I was also concerned that the light fixtures, electric candelabras, were too dim. Lots of bulbs at the "stage" end of the room were burned out.

Well. Night of, our contact arrives with her husband and her sister and a co-group member. My wife was also on hand and between them, the stage manager and I, figured out every concern in short order -- including dinner, which I always forget to eat on performance nights.

The room was set up with about thirty chairs. They succeeded in finding the only screen in Cumbria so we had that to work with, and our contact's husband "pinched" the lights from the fixtures in the back of the room to fill out those in the front.

There were something short of thirty people in attendance. I was feeling surprisingly relaxed in my delivery. My stage manager said she could tell, that whenever I am comfortable I "mess up" a lot of lines, but fuck her, she's just the fucking stage manager, what does she know. Fuck.

The wife joined me for the post-show discussion, and we met some lovely people over tea and cake following that. I almost forgot to ask our contact about her own experience. I sometimes need to remember, when dealing with bereavement groups (as opposed to, say, medical institutions) that many of the people I am working with have also lost children. And even when I do, well, I guess I wait for them to bring it up. Shame on me.

She and her husband lost a boy just shy of one year ago. I had a long talk with him about the boy, and about the way he has dealt with it. Saying our good-byes I wished her a good day on the 28th and that's when the tears started. I felt bad, the way people do, for "bringing it up," which is ridiculous when you think about what I have been doing for the past six years. It also goes to show how ingrained these reactions are.

St. Cuthbert's is a great little church. The sides are lined with old tombstones that, for all appearances, were uprooted from the field next to the building. It's a nice, open space, walled-in. The entire time we were there, all evening, there were young people lying about, eating, drinking, making out, on that space.

I thought it was odd, that they had moved the stones, to make that field. "Why?" my wife asked.

So many of the stones included references to babies that died in infancy. I heard Philip Roth on Terry Gross last week, talking about his book Everyman. The subject was cemeteries, and he noted there how many stones were for children in the old days, and that you don't see that much anymore, because it isn't as much of a problem. I like Philip Roth, but he's been around too long to be that dumb.

Original blog post: June 10, 2007

Sands UK Tour, Day Two: Carlisle

Ten years ago this month, the Stillbirth and Neonatal Death Charity (SANDS UK) sent my solo performance I Hate This (a play without the baby) on a seven date tour of Great Britain.

Saturday, 9 June 2007

Otters in The Lanes

Sitting by the window in our hotel room at the Crown and Mitre, overlooking Greenmarket Square, praying two children take their naps sometime soon. There is a community band playing in the gazebo.

These kids are cracking each other up, each in their own beds. There is also a carousel knocked up in the square, which several family members have indulgently taken them on four times each - and at £2 a pop, too. No wonder they can't get to sleep.

We had an extremely indulgent birthday dinner here at the hotel for my sister-in-law last night, each of us at different intervals struggling to keep our sanity and our lunch as we struggled to fight off jet lag. The wine didn't help in this regard, but it was an excellent meal.

I thought the girl did particularly well, she had convinced herself that she had had a full night's sleep the night before because she slept until the sun came up. But her behavior at dinner, at bit fractious at the beginning, was merely as loopy as the rest of ours by dessert.

The boy did what he usually does, which is eat everything in sight. Especially soup. He really, really loves soup.

My family was in bed by ten. We woke twelve hours later when our company manager came knocking at the door. So much for the complementary breakfast. It was swiftly decided that the wife would join the rest of the women to catch a bus to see Hadrian's Wall, and that the kids and I would skulk about Carlisle.

Hadrian's Wall was the outer edge of the Roman Empire, a great barrier to keep those marauding Scots out. The greatest empire history had ever known, nearing its end, running out of ideas, decided to put up a big old wall.*

I had no idea what to expect from central Carlisle, but we couldn't have picked a better day to spend time out in it. It's warm and sunny, and the place is just crowded, there's lots of shops, and as I mentioned, plenty of outdoor entertainments. There are several arcades and one featured this lovely not-fountain with bronze otters playing in it.

Last night we met our contact for the performance at St. Cuthbert's Church, where we will be performing tonight. The crowd is expected to be small, so we will be in a room roughly the size of the fellowship hall I was in last year in Wandsworth.

As always, I am concerned about tech. There's no screen for the projector, so we will be setting up something like an easel to cast the slides onto. Also, we haven't had to work with an integrated computer system since the music was incorporated into the PowerPoint presentation, so it will be a mystery as to how acceptable the sound will be coming from the projector. But it is, as I said, a small room.

Original blog post: June 9, 2007

*No, seriously. I made this observation ten years ago. - 6/9/2017

Sands UK Tour, Day One: Glasgow

Ten years ago this month, the Stillbirth and Neonatal Death Charity (SANDS UK) sent my solo performance I Hate This (a play without the baby) on a seven date tour of Great Britain.

Friday, 8 June 2007

On the train from Glasgow to Carlisle. The girls are all making "awwww" noises at the nursing sheep on the hillside.

The girl (age 4) had a Trans-Atlantic Freak-Out last night (that's also the name of my new album, Trans-Atlantic Freak-Out!) She'd fallen asleep, but kept waking herself up, kicking my mother-in-law and whining terribly. It lasted maybe twenty minutes, she was just inconsolable until she finally fell asleep.

My wife reminded me that the exact same thing happened a year ago, last spring, when we last made this voyage. Weird. Just too much stress, exhaustion, the adrenaline rush of an anticipated trip winding down, turbulence, cramped space (the seats have gotten smaller for her, you know) and who knows what else.

Arriving was a great relief, and we soon settled into what I hope is a regular part of our journey together, which is this: not rushing to do anything. We sat around, drinking coffee for a while before we set off to catch a bus. There's too many bags and people to dash off anywhere, we almost left my wife's bag on the first bus. Heck, we almost left my passport at home.

The kids are awesome travelers. At least, they are at this age, I hope they don't lose that. We talk about all the things we see, and don't linger over stuff they don't express much interest in.

Today was a walk with death.

Any trip to a British cathedral is a festival of dead people. There are monuments to fallen soldiers, dead bodies under plaques beneath your feet, and tombs all over the place.

But St. Mungo is a very special place. Not only is there there cathedral (featuring Blackadder Aisle, but it's not what you think) but next to it is the St Mungo Museum of Religious Life and Art, which we unfortunately did not have time to really explore, though the wife did take a moment to tie a ribbon to the Couty Tree to remember Calvin and to give the tour some good juju.

And then there is the Necropolis, a cemetery that winds up a high hill overlooking Glasgow. Hundreds of prominent Glaswegians are resting there, including the William Miller, the man who wrote Wee-Willie Winkie.

Before we had even begun the trek up the hill, we came upon a small plot dedicated to dead children. The stone reads, "I will not forget you ... I have held you in the palm of my hand." - Isaiah 49:15 and there were a large number of soft animals and other soggy mementoes left there. That was an auspicious sight, and also very sweet.

Original blog post: June 8, 2007

The Crown (TV show)

John Lithgow (right) as Winston Churchill in "The Crown"

The problem with using the stage to make direct and obvious political statement is that the message can be misinterpreted, casually dismissed, or in the case of most local productions, singing to the choir or more often ignored entirely.

The first year of Guerrilla Theater Company our more obvious agitprop was leavened with playful absurdity, but as our more pointed statements we from time to time dismissed out of hand or criticized, we bent the rules of inclusion to force each of the performer-writers to defend the point of each brief vignette. In short order the creators of some of our most popular pieces decided to move on and our audiences dwindled.

When a company decides to present a classic piece of political theater, the language and situation would most likely not most obviously resemble contemporary concerns. When Ensemble Theatre presented Waiting For Lefty six years ago (to take one example) they strove for period accuracy in production in costume and design, but their video projections reflected the very recent Occupy Wall Street uprisings. And yet, the Great Recession was not the Great Depression and the pictures did nothing to change Odets' clumsy words. In spite of using David Bowie in the soundtrack, it was still more museum piece than think piece.

Timing is also important. Bad Epitaph produced Lysistrata in 2000, which was enjoyed as an absurd sex comedy, but as we were not currently engaged in an wars (at least not any we could see) the playwright’s original political intent was beside the point. We came a bit closer to the mark in 2004 when we produced Kirk Wood Bromley’s The American Revolution.

True, we made no obvious references to the present geopolitical situation, the early years of Bush’s war in Iraq, and the Colonial version of occupier and freedom-fighter, but just putting it out there seemed to make its own statement. As Plain Dealer critic Tony Brown put it, we didn’t need to be “ponderously obvious” about it, as that was his job.

“One imagines that if the revolutionaries were to say and do now some of things they said and did then, John Ashcroft probably would have them locked up without lawyers in the prison at Guantanamo Bay on terrorism charges,” said Brown.

Ladies and gentlemen, ponderously obvious.

The Trump era has invited a slew of productions of Julius Caesar, which has been an obvious go-to for those who would warn against tyranny in all it forms, for centuries. In New York this summer you can see a modern-dress production for free at the Delacorte in Central Park, or an Off-Broadway production by Access Theatre featuring an all-female cast and set in an independent, girls’ school.

Orson Welles' "Julius Caesar" (1937)

It is facile to swap out one political leader for another. Arguably when Orson Welles presented this work during the reign of Mussolini, that strongman must have appeared to be a literal incarnation of almighty Caesar. But Donald J. Trump more closely inhabits the strengths and failings of Caesar -- as conceived of by William Shakespeare -- especially in those scenes where he loudly protests his immutability even as he agrees with who ever spoke with him most recently.

But a military genius with an extensive record of victories on the battle-field? Darn that ankle spur.

The question remains whether or not political commentary on stage has any relevance at all. To those of us who are theater practitioners, of course it does. But most people do not see plays, are unaware of plays, are entirely unaffected by plays.

However, the extremity of the actions of and declarations from the Trump Administration have emboldened commercial entities, which would normally avoid controversy and offense. We live in a golden era of men in suits sitting at desks (and one woman standing in slacks) taking the piss out of the president every night of the week.

In fact, the word and actions of the young Trump Administration have been so extreme, and transparently anti-democratic, that any creative expression in regards to totalitarianism and propaganda in the service of such ends can appear to be intentional commentary on the current president.

Yes, sales of George Orwell’s 1984 spiked after the inauguration, but when Audible produced a television ad featuring Zachary Quinto performing an audiobook version, it created controversy. Reading passages from a seventy year-old book is commentary on Donald Trump? Whose fault is that, Audible’s, Orwell’s or Trump’s?

Hulu’s production of The Handmaid’s Tale includes scenes that appear to emulate the January 21, 2017 Women’s March, but production started last year, long before the election. How might this program have been received during a Hillary Clinton Administration? How significant is it a big screen Wonder Woman came out this past weekend and has broken all kinds of records including biggest opening for a female director. Has the disappointment and disillusionment of the past six months actually fed interest in such a vehicle?

Last week I started watching the Netflix series The Crown, which debuted four days before this past election. I like Peter Morgan, loved The Queen, The Audience. I’m an Anglophile, and my interest in the monarchy reaches beyond what is necessary to comprehend Shakespeare’s history plays.

With this series, dramatising the first months of the reign of Elizabeth II, Morgan seems to be a bit more heavy-handed with the exposition than with other treatises on Elizabeth Windsor, as though he assumes most of his audience will be American - or at the very least, not British. The idea of having to explain to the new queen that she chooses her royal name (her father George VI was born Albert, for example) is ridiculous, she knows that.

I’m loving John Lithgow as Winston Churchill, the first time I have seen any actor embody the character without doing a Churchill impression. Episode four, "Act of God," felt as though it too were mocking the new American President for his behavior, even though that episode, like the entire season, were all released on the same date, November 4, 2016.

The Great Smog of 1952

The Great Smog of 1952 was a bizarre weather event, an “anticyclone” which trapped air pollution - mostly the result of the use of coal for electricity and heat - over the Greater London area for several days. It was catastrophic, resulting in thousands or by some estimates over one hundred thousand deaths, due to either accidents due to low visibility or illness due to inhalation. These facts are a matter of historical record.

"Act of God" suggests Churchill, the Prime Minister, intentionally ignored scientific studies which made plain the health risks related to the coal-based power infrastructure and even reports that such a freak weather event were possible.

That I watched this episode on the very day President Trump announced the United States was withdrawing from the Paris Agreement wasn’t even the most alarmingly prescient element of this episode. That came when, in the midst of a national calamity, the Prime Minister was determined, during a cabinet meeting, on ranting about whether the Queen’s consort, Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, should be allowed to train for a pilot’s license.

The comparison is ponderously obvious.

Source:
Freedom Rings With An Edge in “American Revolution” by Tony Brown, The Plain Dealer, 6/23/2004
Great Smog of London, Wikipedia