The Bully of Baker Street: Coloring Sheet!

Designed by Luke Brett, this original coloring sheet has been provided to school aged kids across town, and we have received some wonderful works of art in return!

If there are any adult coloring aficionados out there who would like to take their shot with this image of “Vicky & Sherlock,” I would love to see the results.

UPDATE: "Sherlock Holmes Meets the Bully of Baker Street" is now available from Pioneer Drama Service

On the Dark Side of Twilight: Akron Main Public Library

Ten years ago, Great Lakes Theater produced my first outreach tour "On the Dark Side of Twilight."

Sunday, February 28, 2010

Fantastic afternoon in Akron, yo. Marked improvement over when we drew 6 people for the 2008 tour. Okay eight - but two walked out. A great crowd; girls from Elms who dragged their parents in to check us out, students from Tallmadge High who have created their own adaptation of Dracula for the stage (Vlad Dracul) and even an author who has written bout John Polidori!

We were welcomed with open arms and a really big, red dolly to move things into the awesomely awesome hall at Akron Main Public Library, only this guy put our already seriously abused but otherwise charming little table onto the dolly, just letting it wobble there until we hit a ramp and it went crashing into a rail. Snapped a leg right off and damaged the drawer.

It's an important table. We keep props in it that are used throughout the show, and I have to put Dusten's face into it. The library staff worked feverishly with wood glue and a great clamp -- it's great because it looks old and you can barely see it. We will get that back to you, promise!

The post-show discussion was super (thanks in large part to our author) going over aspects of the show which haven't been brought up much since we began. Never yet, for example, has the term "Terrorist Chic" entered the conversation. And this was the first time someone asked if I had a rationale for why Porlock ages.

The Witches: First Reading

Upstairs at Parnell's

What’s next? As I described previously in my post on procrastination, I have been managing my deadlines not by thinking of them all at once, but only by what is next. I would not recommend this as a way to live your life in general, but I found it was the only way I could manage for the present. Only what is right in front of me. I have the skill to manage. And the meds.

And so it was, I completed the first draft of The Witches. Which is to say, I reached the end. The play is not complete, but then why should it be? The Test Flight series “offers artists the opportunity to self-produce works-in-progress.” (CPT website.) It will remain in progress until these performances close on April 11, and beyond.

Director Chennelle, most of the acting company and a few friends met at Parnell’s last week to hear it all out loud, from beginning to end. It read at an hour ten, there’s bits still missing, I will have a longer draft available when rehearsals begin next week.

So, the witches. This is a kitchen sink play, sister to The Vampyres (no, that wasn’t intentional) in that I saw a scene, I felt a mood, and I thought I had something to say. But I didn’t know what was going to happen. Unlike, for example, The Bully of Baker Street, where I had a clear agenda, and plotted a mystery with a beginning middle and end before I started to write, here I had a place, I had characters, and they told me where to go.

And yet, there’s an awful lot going on here, as the readers and listeners made evident. Because it’s not just about witches, it’s about ghosts. It’s not just about women, it’s about generations of women.

Women who should respect each other, but don’t. Those who believe "the young and brash are destroying the work." (Craig's words.) Those who see themselves as functionaries in the grand schemes of their elders. And those who keep their heads down and just keep working.

Then there’s New England, and Salem, and the old beliefs. Chennelle observed something I have always noticed about places like Salem, or New Orleans. They are like Europe, in that they are loud. Heather called it an energy. They have a loud energy. Perhaps that is only to the descendants of those who came or were brought across the ocean to be here. The weight, the loud energy of our history, which is not evident in the newer buildings and pavement of a Cleveland, but in the wood, the soil, the trees of the colonial, coastal towns and cities.

Our company wants rules. What calls the spirits, what makes them go away? Old Hamlet wandered the ramparts seeking attention, but he was also easily insulted. On the Dark Side of Twilight was all about how the rules for vampires have shifted over time. We also need to understand what those are.

Finally, the characters themselves. The four from 2020, the four (five, actually) from 1692. They each have their own history, biographies which I have created but not yet shared. Because I want to know it makes sense before I tell them why I think it makes sense. We will work together to create a common understanding of their past.

There's more, a lot more. And it's a comedy, that's also important. I want it to be stirring and chilling and funny. During our discussion someone mentioned a line from Poltergeist and I thought, well, I know exactly where that goes.

Right now I am feeling excited and grateful, grateful to work day after day with so many talented, loving people. A long, long time ago, when we were youngish, I was sitting with a playwright friend in the Arabica on Coventry, musing pretentiously about the Algonquin Round Table, and how I wished that one day we would be famous and spend our days just writing and our nights sitting around a pub or restaurant getting tight and tossing off bon mots, night after night after night.

Yes, well. I'm not famous and I neither write for a living nor do I spend every evening drinking and posing about. But there are these moments, and there quite a few of them, when we share in semi-public spaces, chatting and drinking, and reading and doing the work, and I think I got what I always wanted after all.

Parnell's Irish Pub Playhouse Square is located at 1415 Euclid Avenue in Cleveland.

On the Dark Side of Twilight: Cleveland Sight Center

Ten years ago, Great Lakes Theater produced my first outreach tour "On the Dark Side of Twilight."

Friday, February 26, 2010

Our performance today at the Cleveland Sight Center has been cancelled. This is very disappointing, I love that venue. But the snow just keeps coming down, if we went ahead with the performance I would be concerned there would be no audience.

The Bully of Baker Street: Week Three

Newton D. Baker Elementary

In the past three weeks, Classics On Tour has already staged twenty-nine performances of Sherlock Holmes Meets the Bully of Baker Street! They have nineteen more (and one workshop) to go!

In addition to the many schools the Sherlock Holmes Meets the Bully of Baker Street tour is visiting, we are also taking the show to fifteen libraries and other public venues.

At a few public libraries, the audience has been almost entirely made up of adults, fans of the great detective in all of his permutations. The big people are no less enthusiastic about responding to the questions the characters ask them during the performance and seem to understand they are attending a show meant for children.

Post-show discussions run in different directions with these audiences, as adults have questions not only about the show, but about the purpose of the show. About the theme of bullying, and how our student audiences have responded.

Pioneer Drama Service
(Published 2021)

On our post-show evaluation, audience members are invited to share their thoughts about what they most liked about the show, and also what they liked the least. One woman, a senior citizen, wrote, “Too preachy!” And I suppose it is. You could say it’s meant to be.

During the post-show discussion, one audience member in Lakewood, after first making clear that she was very happy to see a diverse cast, wanted to know how intentional the casting was. A generation ago it would have been the politically correct thing to just say the casting was “color-blind” and wasn’t intentional at all. 

But that isn’t true, and our acting company addressed that with their response. Because the play is, in fact, a little preachy, and because we knew we would be sending the play into schools with a predominantly African-American student body, the picture of who is doing to lecturing and who is being lectured to -- and also who is doing the bullying -- these were all issues we wanted to take into account when creating the company.

Chagrin Falls Intermediate School

One comment that has confused me was the person who wrote on their evaluation “No Politics!!” I’d like to know what they meant. There is nothing overtly political in my script. Is Vicky being called a “nasty girl” a political statement? Is Vicky’s pride in becoming an American immigrant a political statement?

If these expressions are thought to be political, whose fault is that?

To be continued.

UPDATE: "Sherlock Holmes Meets the Bully of Baker Street" is now available from Pioneer Drama Service

On the Dark Side of Twilight: Evaluations

Ten years ago, Great Lakes Theater produced my first outreach tour "On the Dark Side of Twilight."

Wednesday, 24, 2010

Following every performance we have a brief discussion between the audience and the company - and we ask that people fill out a survey included in the program. The comments so far have been very positive, I wanted to share a few of them:

"This was great. My granddaughter had a blast and thank your cast for staying and talking to them after the show."

"I have attended many GLTF productions before, but not the outreach. It was great. I'm sure the area students would love it."

"The one costume needs to be fixed for the young man."

"We really do need more arts and culture in our community, thank you so much!"

"It was wonderfully awesome."

And this answer to the question, what was least effective about the production:

"It could have been longer."

By the way, here is an interesting fact: We do not use smoke in our production. It is water-based fog. Your coughing is psychosomatic.

On the Dark Side of Twilight: Workshop Players

Ten years ago, Great Lakes Theater produced my first outreach tour "On the Dark Side of Twilight."

Tuesday, February 23, 2010

Mistakes were made.

May I begin by saying our hosts at Workshop Players were stunning fabulous, resourceful, helpful and, might I add, cheery? This was a first-time venue, the GLTF outreach tour had never stopped here before. An old, small schoolhouse, converted into a state-of-the-art community theater-in-the-round in Amherst, with a staff on hand to help us load in, set up and load out, and they made us delicious, hot soup!

Honestly, this one hundred seat theater has the cleanest, best appointed green room I have ever seen. And because it's downstairs, they have these cameras to keep an eye on the stage. For our purposes, tonight, however, we lost a bank of seats to make room for our set. Even so, there was not much room, and setting up and performing was a bit of scramble.

We also had a deeper, narrower stage with people on three sides, which made blocking a challenge. Some of the words coming out of our mouths were a challenge, too. I do not know what shook me at the outset but I kept bobbling words in a manner I was not used to. But the response from the full house of ninety (yes! another full house!) made it emotionally possible for me to shamelessly chew the scenery during The Interview.

A prop was misplaced ... something was said twice ... but we didn't break any furniture (that happened yesterday) and really, considering the sheer weight of costumes, props, sound cues, blood and fog, I think we are managing things pretty well. It helps when we get soup.

Emily pointed out to me that almost the entire back row was filled with teenage girls, with long, straight, black hair. Sad girl win!