On Collaboration

“F---ing synonyms.” - James Alexander Rankin

Notes on a Wednesday evening rehearsal:

Why I love this collaborative work, and having experience creating theater so many talented, wonderful friends. There’s a four-line gag between Benedick and his disgusting companion Pene. It is the drinking song I mentioned yesterday, the soon-to-be-legendary Privvy Song.

James and I have been messing with it, in fact Carli worked with us on choreography last week. But I wasn’t happy with the tune. I mean, it shouldn’t really be a tune, not really, but our ditty sounded tuneless and arbitrary. I wanted some guidance from someone who knows something about music. And drinking. So I called Ali.

She sent me an mp3 last night, she sang it herself. It’s perfect, just what I wanted. Ali is so awesome. James and I worked the choreography again with this new version last night and it is so much better.

Yesterday afternoon Daniel and I visited the Alcazar to conduct our annual pre-show presentation and discussion with interested residents. How will audiences react to this new “prequel” to a familiar and much-loved old play? If our theater fans there are any indication, they are excited about it!

Following each performance during the tour we conduct a brief takback with the audience. I provided Daniel some sample questions yesterday, dealing with the content of the work. Why do people find it so difficult to be honest about their feelings? Do men and women handle their feelings differently, and if so in what way? How do you cope with tragedy?  I would like to have the chance to talk about these things with people who come to see the show, and less about my creative process in writing it. I like talking about the work I have done, but then then discussions all become about that. There’s a lot of personal investment in the content, and I am curious about what audiences will find in it.

We run lines prior to rehearsal, there are so many freaking words, and paraphrasing may be an issue. But with the playwright present at all times, it is hard to get away with that. As with Shakespeare's verse, if you have the meter it usually comes out right.

Meanwhile, I am still trying to get all my silly voices straight.

Double Heart: Countdown

One week from tonight Double Heart (The Courtship of Beatrice and Benedick) will open at The Alcazar in Cleveland Heights. As Daniel says, The Alcazar must hold a record for the most world premiere plays in Cleveland ... at least during the 21st Century.

Pretty ladies in pretty dresses.

We have a dance, a fight and a drinking song ... well, it's not a "drinking" song, per se ... in fact, it's the opposite of a drinking song, if you follow me. There are many beautiful sights and sounds, and some not so beautiful, in fact, the opposite of beautiful -- but we all look very good. And ideally, we will sound good. The text has been frustrating me the past two days. I have been striving to pick up the pace and not eat too much of the scenery. Good luck, as the kids say, with that.

But it is very sweet. We have a night off this evening, I will be visiting the folks at These Are The Times. I am counting on much of the text to drop in so, and have a great final run-up to opening. I am definitely looking forward to moving into a new space where making quick changes will not be quite so challenging. Did I mention I am playing four different characters?

Why, yes. Yes, I am.

Double Heart: Love → Building on Fire

Big day for fires in downtown Cleveland today. First at the West Side Market, then this afternoon in the basement of the Hanna Building. I didn't see it, I was bent over my desk all afternoon constructing a budget. But that was the news, and the place evacuated late enough that this evening's rehearsal was relocated to the GLT board room.

You can rehearse anywhere, really.

There are some truly beautiful, rude and romantic moments being created here. There's a wordy, clever package which includes as many classroom-appropriate allusions to sexual contact as I could muster. Soon after, gears switch, there's play and tenderness and honesty. The boys will howl, the girls will swoon. Or so I dearly hope.

Assessment

Today was truly the longest day of the longest month. Rehearsals for the Great Lakes Theater School Residency Program are in full-swing. Expansive hours in a vacant office in the Hanna Building (not the site of Edith’s studio - she was in a penthouse on the top floor) training four new actor-teachers how to illuminate the classics for a potential 16,000 students in Northeast Ohio during this school year.

Last night it was Curriculum Night at Noble Elementary, attended now by not only my daughter but my son. My wife and I are members of the PTA. Please Vote Yes On Issue 6. Heights schools depend on it.

There is a great deal of theater in my future. Sunday we will be present for a matinee of The Life of Galileo at the Allen Theatre, the new home of Cleveland Play House. Next week in the Hanna Theatre, Cabaret opens Great Lakes 50th Season, and The Taming of the Shrew opens the following week.

Before the first half of 2012 comes to a close, I will have been playwright, actor and director for three different shows at three different companies.

Meanwhile, I am still attemtping to conduct my exploration of Cleveland during different points in history. Recently I have been looking into the fifties … however, with the impending staged reading of It Can’t Happen Here, we will be dipping back into the year 1936 … as if that weren’t already apparent.

Last year, during the first weekend of September, I took a 24-hour writer’s holiday with the intention of completeing an entire play. I wrote one act, which while shy of my goal was not something I was unproud of.

… what a dizzying array of double-negatives, now where wasn’t I ?

It is my intention to jump back onto that train very soon, hopefully in the form of another retreat at my parents home in Lakewood. Having had a year to meditate on the second act, purgation is definitely in order. But not this weekend. Or the next. Nor the one after that.

Let’s say October. New play in October. Someone hold me to that.

Edith Stevenson Wright

Edith's Hanna Building Penthouse
Apartment & Studio, 1954

Edith Stevenson Wright (1883 - 1975) was born in Youngstown, the daughter of a British immigrant steelworker. She spent her life largely in Cleveland, Ohio, as an accomplished and (as such things go) successful portrait painter, living and working in the Hanna Building penthouse. She was married to and divorced from theater critic Ivan Wright, they had two children, Blaine and Dare. Dare Wright was a fashioned model, later photographer, and author of The Lonely Doll (1957) as well as a series of other children's books.

Edith began training at the age of 13 at the Central Ontario School of Art, and by 16 she was mentoring under J.W.L. Forester, a British painter of government ministers.

In 1954 Edith had painted a portrait of Winston Churchill, which was unveiled at Christmastime at the University of Bristol. Sir Philip Morris, vice chancellor of the university, was so taken with the work that he told Edith he was going to arrange a sitting with the 28 year-old Queen Elizabeth, then only one year into her reign. Using dare as a model, she created an eight-foot drawing to prepare for this most amazing opportunity, which unfortunately never materialized.

The only Edith Stevenson Wright I have ever seen up and close and in person used to hang in the Schubert Library at the Cleveland Play House. It was a bit of a surprise, last fall, finally - after three years in the Playwrights Unit - to climb the circular staircase to the balcony of that dectagonal room to get a closer look at the cases filled with marionettes, and the portraits of former CPH Artistic Directors. I did not expect to come face to face with an artist whose name I was familiar with.

Edith had painted a portrait of actress and company member Helen Watkins. She was a player with CPH for decades, Edith's painting dates from the 1950s. In The Crucible, Ms. Watkins played Rebecca Nurse.

Sources:
The Secret Life of the Lonely Doll (Jean Nathan)
The Plain Dealer
Wikipedia

Dare Wright

Dare Wright
(December 3, 1914 – January 25, 2001)
... and speaking of children's books featuring black and white photographs of stuffed bears in real-world settings ...

Born in Canada in 1914, Dare Wright spent most of her formative years in Cleveland. Her parents were separated when she was a child. Her older brother Blaine lived with their alcoholic, theater critic father, while she lived with her mother, professional portrait painter Edith Stevenson Wright.

Settling in Cleveland in 1919, and after a few living arrangements based upon the kindness of strangers, the independent painter and her young daughter found their own apartment in Cleveland Heights in 1921. She was commissioned to paint lawyers, judges, politicians - and finally received the favor of the Hanna family. She painted a posthumous portrait of Marcus Bales Hanna, and later his son, Daniel Sr. owner of the Cleveland Leader, and later the News. They lavished her with connections and attention, granting her studio space in the Hanna Building.

I work in the Hanna Building. Crazy.

Dare went to Coventry Elementary School, and by fourth grade a boarder at Laurel School. Biographer Jean Nathan in her book The Secret Life of The Lonely Doll suggests that her life of impermanence coupled with her mother's focus on the superficial (because, you know, she was a painter) was a major factor in shaping Dare's deep-seated sorrow regarding connection with actual people, and her tendency to render inanimate objects with personality and as a repository for her fantasies of love and acceptance.

If Dare were raised by her successful, aloof, artist father and had an ne'er-do-well mother who drank a lot, it would still be called the mother's fault for Dare's becoming a glamorous, disaffected freak, because that is how we look at things.

Edith's success grew. She painted Calvin Coolidge's portrait in 1928 and it was hung in Public Hall, where he had received his party's nomination in 1924. In 1935 a cigarette caused a fire in Public Hall and the portrait was destroyed.

Graduating from Laurel in 1933 (top five in her class) Dare moved to New York and discovered the brother she had never known. Her journeys took her from there to Hollywood (where she failed to become an actress) back to Cleveland and to New York, eventually establishing herself as a stunning, stylish model for fashion magazines.

She became a photographer, and was equally accomplished in front of and behind the camera. In 1957 she created her legendary children's book, The Lonely Doll featuring Edie, a felt Lenci Doll from her own childhood, named after her mother. In the story this most lonely of dolls is visited by Mr. Bear and Little Bear (stand-ins, of course, for her absent father and brother) and after a tentative period of discovery and tests of trust, the trio is bonded forever and will never be apart again.

The Lonely Doll disappeared in obscurity - but remained a strong, psychic presence in the mind of many baby boomer aged children, and eventually returned to print in 1998. We have a copy. My daughter's middle name is Dare.

Dare Wright died in 2001.

Sources:
Wikipedia
The Secret Life of the Lonely Doll
This American Life