George Bernard Shaw born July 26, 1856 (112 years before me, to the day)
A theatrical production has a strict time limit. From the beginning, you know when it will end; there are set performance dates, so when you are cast as an actor, when you have been assigned a role, you have a set period of time in which to prepare.
David Mamet says you don’t need to prepare anything, just read the words on the page, in the right order, all the rest is self-aggrandizement. In this, as in so many other things, Mamet is just wrong. Silly and wrong. It is true, the audience can’t see your backstory, will never know or even care how many books you read – in a very, very short time – to learn about the time period, the setting, the particular brand of tea your character might drink.
But as a twenty year-old in 1989, playing a twenty(ish) year-old in 1904, there are things that are seen and heard by the audience that are very important. After all, this isn’t a movie. The set helps, the costumes help, but the performer is the primary focus and it is the details, the immersion into character that either transports the audience or it doesn’t.
True, there are actors who are so compelling in and of themselves that they do not need to do any kind of deep research. The rest of us try harder.
My third year at school was the most challenging, and revelatory. I won’t get into the details, but following a near nervous breakdown in the fall, I was (for the first time) reborn with a renewed sense of purpose, and expanded my major from acting to a general theater degree. It was as the man said, “Look to your left, look to your right, only one of you will complete a degree in acting.” I was not the one.
Winter 1989, I had no acting practicum. I had not been cast in either mainstage show, I had no lab work, I focused on my studies, worked to control my diet, grew my hair, tried to be what today they call mindful.
That spring, however, I had three shows to split my focus; a role on the main stage, I had written a one-act for the playwrights’ festival, and I was assigned a role in a lab production of George Bernard Shaw’s How He Lied to Her Husband.
Third year undergrads were paired with graduate level directors to create an evening of one-acts. It was a class, so rehearsals were during the day. Our director was, or he seemed to me at the time, a rather intense man, charming in his way, and we spent weeks on the text with him. Weeks.
We were a three-person cast, I was He, the ingénue. It was the only time I have ever played a fresh-faced young man. She was my then ex-girlfriend Jules, and Her Husband was played by my best friend, Rich. The four of us sat in chairs around a small, square table on the stage of the Little Theatre, like we were about to play Bridge, only we had scripts instead of cards, and George, our director, led us through the piece, word by word.
We would read a word, or a short phrase, and we would stop and he would talk, and ask us questions, while throughout he would handroll a cigarette. This was part of the process. Every mechanical part of rolling a cigarette would take a significant amount of time, each rehearsal. I don’t mean to say he moved in slow motion, just that, as one of us read a phrase, he would get out his papers, and stop and we would talk, his hand holding the envelope of papers, for however long the discussion lasted, maybe five minutes, before moving on, now the envelope was gone, but the paper was between his fingers, and so on, forty-five minutes into rehearsal there might be tobacco resting in the the fold of the paper, I would be fixated on one strand of tobacco leaf hanging from the edge as he held it there, as we discussed the text, it may finally be a complete cigarette after an hour or so. It was a mystery to me and we never commented on it.
I imagine this ritual prevented him from smoking throughout the rehearsal, in this way he limited himself to one. But I found it fascinating. Time expanded as we ruminated upon the manners of the very early 20th century, for a piece for which every word is carefully chosen.
As a writer, I do appreciate that one thing above all other considerations, is that actors say the words, all the words, and in the order that they are set down upon the page. But you will never have so much time to read, understand, consider, and digest them, as you will at school.
I know this is not entirely the case, there are those theaters that make it a practice to spend months on a production. But they are the exception. A LORT production will have a very short turnaround, where are actors are often expected to arrive on day one with lines memorized, because of the cost. Time is, as they say, money.
I applied to two schools. One accepted me. And so I matriculated into the Ohio University School of Theatre. I had no idea the school was in flux at that time. A sudden transition of leadership. I wasn’t even asked to audition.
Why did I want to study theater? Why wasn’t I an English major? Because acting was play and writing was work. There was an instant gratification in doing a play, and none for writing – I did not see how writing could get me attention, at least not positive attention (that is a story for another day) and attention had always been what I craved.
I am a 57 year-old man who keeps a blog. Of course I crave attention.
Erin Cameron, Steven Pack "Living Together" by Alan Ayckbourn Bay High School, 1986
I tried my hand at directing a two-act play (Living Together by Alan Ayckbourn) my senior year in high school. I had no idea what I was doing. Tell a bunch of my friends to move about on stage and there would be a play. No thought about costumes, or a set – I knew there were odd furniture pieces stored backstage, we’d use those – and light? To me, light was the invisible art. Surely, you just turn them on at the beginning and fade them out at the end.
I wasn’t just inexperienced with design, I was ignorant of design. I had never noticed it. It did not exist.
And that was who I was and how I started my undergraduate theater experience. I knew nothing. I would soon be trying everything.
The other night I was at the Dark Room, and before the event began some of us were chatting about that eternal question, who do I have to fuck to get people to see my show?
Default promotion, in the old days, required purchasing advertisements in the paper. The quiet part was that if the theater didn’t pay, the paper wouldn’t review your play, and it was always the reviews which drove ticket sales, not the ads themselves.
Today, with the absence of print journalism, theaters pay for ads on Facebook or Instagram. Direct mail is also still a thing, and it is important, because at the very least you need to let people who have already shown an interest in your company about what is coming soon.
But, and this is the case for every single theater, from LORT A down to that immersive storefront production with ten folding chairs, to have a successful production you must go beyond. You need to appeal to non-regular theater goers, because there are never enough of those. There certainly aren’t enough theater artists to fill the seats at any house, and they shouldn’t be expected to, anyway, because they are busy doing theater.
So, how do you get the word out? How do you, as they say, let ‘em know?
As I have recounted before, I have always loved marketing, products and swag. In high school we started an improv troupe and I was much more interested in selling the buttons we had made for the troupe (buttons were big in the 80s) than rehearsing improvisation.
And who designed these buttons? I did, of course, using my brother’s brand new Macintosh computer. They did not go very well, however, not as well as the Guerrilla Theater Company pins we made years later, those sold very well though I still have a couple hundred of them in my attic.
At college, a graduate student who was put in charge of marketing for the school of theater approved of the comic strip I drew for the daily university paper, and especially liked when I would include references to current productions. He’d made an arrangement with a local pizza place to include flyers for the upcoming production of On the Verge by Eric Overmyer, but he wanted something original, that would engage someone who had just ordered a pizza.
I created a “chutes-and-ladders” style board game with paper cut-outs of the three main characters and you would roll a die and move your piece around a cartoon globe, traveling through time and space to opening night of the show!
Guerrilla Theater Company had a regular advertising deal with the Free Times, we’d buy the smallest advertisement we could, but we’d buy them pretty much every week. Not just to keep folks aware of the show, and not just to announce the theme of the weekend, but to continually flog the Guerrilla Connection.
The idea for the Connection came from Dial-A-Song, a service provided by They Might Be Giants since the mid-1980s, a phone number you can call to this day and hear an original song. We had a designated line which would have a different message every week, letting folks know the theme of the week, hear a short play, or important announcements.
It occurs to me only right now that we didn’t need a separate line to do this. The office line as xxx-9002, the Connection was xxx-9003. The message could have been the regular office line, why did we pay for two lines? I guess we thought it was to separate “business” from “the show.” Whatever.
But the advertisements weren’t enough to fill the house. That happened occasionally when we had a review, or when we were interviewed for the radio. We had a gorilla costume, and sometimes one of us, usually Torque, would don the suit and we would hand out small flyers for the show. On college campuses. At rallies.
Once, we mocked up fake parking tickets. They looked just like real City of Cleveland parking tickets, with VIOLATION in big letters at one end, and amusing fine print which promoted the show (and the Guerrilla Connection). Torque wore the gorilla suit and went around downtown, ticketing every single car we came across. No idea whether we attracted a single audience member through this gambit, but we did get one message to our office line threatening legal action, which we found hilarious.
When it came time to promote Bad Epitaph Theater Company’s first free, outdoor production, Kirk Wood Bromley’s The American Revolution, we returned to buttons. Only this time, we weren’t selling them. Company members were asked to wear large buttons featuring the first American President and the legend “ASK ME” in large letters.
The plan was that, when someone did, in fact, ask, said company member would not only fill in the inquirer about the details of the upcoming production, but would also take the opportunity to ask for a dollar to support the production – a Washington for Washington, as it were. Mind, this was in 2004, over ten years before the Hamilton $10 ticket lottery, known as Ham4Ham.
Yes, Bad Epitaph must have pulled in over fifty dollars through this gambit, but that wasn’t the point, it was to open a conversation about the show, with a random selection of people who may or may not otherwise have had any interest in seeing a play, this play, any play. And that’s what it’s all about, to move past impersonal modes of advertising, be they print advertisements, online invitations or email blasts, to get to the point where people, lots of people, are actually talking to each other about a show.
Note: The title of this post comes from the book Guerrilla P.R.: How You Can Wage an Effective Publicity Campaign...Without Going Broke (Harper Collins, 1993) which I unironically purchased after the disillusion of Guerrilla Theater Company, when I went to work as Director of Public Relations at Dobama Theatre. It was a handy primer on the basics of marketing though this edition is now almost entirely obsolete as it was written just before the rise of the Internet. Levine also produced a revision called Guerrilla P.R. 2.0, released in 2008.
Promotional Mailing Great Lakes Theater Festival, 1989
My third year at Ohio University was Our Shakespeare Year. We hadn’t touched the Bard my previous two years, at all. But the school was producing Romeo & Juliet that spring, so it was necessary to bring us all up to speed. We rehearsed soliloquies for performance, the school purchased a complete set of John Barton’s “Playing Shakespeare” series on VHS.
Side note on the “Playing Shakespeare” tapes. They were expensive and Mother Martha V., our beloved school secretary, kept a close eye on them. They were for classroom use only, they were not to be borrowed, but they could be stolen which we promptly did, dubbing them off and then returning them. Eventually one went missing (not our fault, I swear) and I have ever after lived in fear.
Also that spring, a certain classical theater company* based in Cleveland was producing Hamlet. Directed by Gerald Freedman, the style was very modern, it was promoted as an “angry young man” version of Hamlet. A number of us drove up from Athens to catch a Saturday matinee, but a water main break in the Ohio Theatre meant the performance was canceled, so my friends and I went to see the just-opened-that-weekend Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade that afternoon.
We did get seats for that evening’s performance, which were way up in the vert last row of the thousand seat house. This would be the very first time I would see a live performance of Hamlet. I hated it.
No doubt I had a chip on my shoulder. I was twenty years old. I had spent an entire semester devoted to the works of Shakespeare. I had memorized an entire soliloquy (two, actually) from the great Dane. I knew a thing or two about Hamlet, and about being an angry young man.
Looking back, I am sure I would have enjoyed this production, if it hadn’t been my first. At the time, I found its touches of modernity far too clever. Claudius had a nasal twang meant to evoke that of sitting President George H.W. Bush (folks hate politics in their Shakespeare), the mad Ophelia went topless, and then there was the man himself whose main objective was, as I recall, to be angry.
One of my mentors gave me a very good piece of advice, to wit; Anger is boring. My own rendition of “O, that this too solid flesh,” was peevish, this Hamlet was literally shaking with rage.
At one point he walks on stage, fires up a spliff, takes a mean drag, and begins, “To be …” It brought the house down. I thought, at the time, that that was entirely inappropriate, turning the most famous speech in the English language into a pot-fueled rant.
Hamlet and the Ghost (Anthony Powell & Peter Aylward) Great Lakes Theater Festival, 1989 Photo: Roger Mastroianni
I have different opinions today, about cannabis and more importantly, about that speech, which I still haven’t figured out. Opinions differed among audiences, too. Letters to the company in response to the production ranged from the outraged to praise like the following:
“Your exciting, riveting production of Hamlet is just about the most creative and wonderful production I have seen in years. The attention and shock which you elicited from the audience was palpable. No one moved, no one coughed, no one spoke throughout the performance.
No wonder. This modern interpretation of the classic was … so meaningful. Freedman did more than change the costumes and setting; he interpreted Hamlet in light of modern times for a contemporary audience.
Yours is the kind of production that young people must see. Then they will understand that Shakespeare was meant to be seen and heard – not read” - Norman W., Cleveland
I agree with all of that. They received some negative letters, too, though most I read were of the “why do you have to mess with Shakespeare?” variety, criticism lobbed at all modern adaptations of Shakespeare for more than a century, and a point of view I find tiresome. The director himself put it very well, in his Director's Note:
"There is no perfect' Hamlet, or a Hamlet for all seasons and all people. One of the difficulties in producing the play is that each person sees Hamlet in himself or herself. Critics have for centuries encrusted the role with ideas and theories that have biased readers to various interpretations. The theater is the place to experience him." - Gerald Freedman
And at least I finally saw it. The entire play, beginning to end, performed by a professional company. Only ten years later I would attempt to direct it myself, and my intention would also be to create an exciting, riveting -- and modern -- production of Hamlet.
Junior year at Ohio University, I was preparing a soliloquy from Hamlet, the one that begins “O, that that this too, too solid flesh …” The day I presented it in workshop for our voice and movement teachers, I was asked why I had chosen this particular piece.
I could have been honest and said, “I don’t know.” I could have said it was the first monologue in the first script I picked up yesterday. I can’t remember what I actually said, but I am sure I tried to bullshit my way through. I was worried I might be asked to choose a different piece, and I’d already worked on this one for over an hour and I did not want to start again.
But they wanted to know, what interested me about the character? Why Hamlet? And the more they asked, the more embarrassed and defensive I became because the fact was, I knew nothing about Hamlet.
I was fortunate enough, attending Bay High School in the early 1980s, that I could still benefit from the expansive liberal arts education that had been afforded to the teeming mass of my Baby Boomer antecedents. We weren’t merely offered the same English curriculum provided to every grade level (English I, English II, etc.) but quarter classes in a variety of genres and disciplines.
I took classes in Journalism, radio drama, Death in Literature, and courses in both Shakespeare Comedy and Shakespeare Tragedy. It was like a college curriculum. We even had a quarter course in Vonnegut, if you can even imagine that.
Richard Burton & Alfred Drake Lunt-Fontanne Theatre, 1964
For Shakespeare’s Tragedies we read Hamlet, King Lear, and Romeo & Juliet (we had all read Macbeth in eighth grade.) We watched the BBC adaptation of King Lear starring Laurence Olivier and John Hurt (1983) and Franco Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet (1968). But we listened to the 1964 Broadway Cast Recording of Hamlet, starring Richard Burton and directed by John Gielgud.
I cannot speak for my classmates, but I absolutely loved these studio recordings. What I remember most was how Burton brought out Hamlet’s great, cynical humor, which I had missed on the page. Wry, sarcastic, incisive, bitter. The guy was an asshole, and so was I.
And so, several years later, it made sense to choose a piece from this play to rehearse for class, but as was normally the case during my undergrad years, I hadn’t bothered to return to the text. I knew nothing about Hamlet.
Folks need to stop auditioning with the tuna fish monologue from Christopher Durang’s Laughing Wild (1987). It’s a go-to comedic monologue for people who need a funny and check a list of “ten best comedic monologues for women” or something, I don’t know where they get it. People born in 2001 can’t possibly have ever seen this show. Anyway, the "Child of Prague" monologue is right there and I’ve never seen anyone try that.
When I was a sophomore at the Ohio University’s School of Theater, I played the role of Father Donnally in an undergraduate production of Durang's The Marriage of Bette and Boo. I recently came across my script, upon which I had drawn a faithful self-portrait (see right) as the character Father Donnally.
For the run at the Public Theatre in 1985, the role of Father Donnally was originated by Richard B. Shull who is best-remembered by my generation for performing as the judge in Billy Joel's "Keeping the Faith" music video. The role of Paul was performed by another Ohio University School of Theater grad, J. Bill McCutcheon who played Uncle Wally on Sesame Street fame and also Dropo in Santa Claus Conquers the Martians.
There was much about this play that I did not understand as a nineteen year-old undergrad. Alcoholism for one, child loss for another. A thinly veiled roman a clef about his own family (the playwright played the protagonist in the original production) Bette is a woman who desperately wants lots of children, but only her first survives. Bette and her husband “Boo” have the Rh factor, which was why my own grandparents’ children all died, in utero or shortly after birth.
Self (Father Donnally) with Katurah Nelson (Bette) "The Marriage of Bette & Boo" Ohio University School of Theatre (1988)
We say quite simply that a couple “can’t have children” but what we’re really saying is that they tried, probably several times, with heartbreaking results. After two miscarriages and a stillbirth, my grandparents adopted my father.
Father Donnally is a figure of patriarchal uselessness. He and a doctor are supposed to be played by the same actor, the only character who is not a member of Bette and Boo's family. A different actor played the doctor in this production.
In the play Bette and Boo, every time another child is expected the doctor arrives with a swaddled bundle, drops it on the floor and announces dispassionately, “It’s dead, the baby’s dead.” In the Forum Theatre at O.U., the doctor dropped the baby from the lighting grid over the stage. On opening night, each announcement got bigger and bigger laughs from the packed house of supportive theater students.
The second weekend of performances was Parents’ Weekend, and that Saturday night there was absolute silence or uncomfortable moans whenever we made a dead baby joke. I asked our director, Dr. Condee, why all our parents didn’t laugh.
He said quite simply, “Maybe they don’t think stillbirth is funny.”
"Balm In Gilead" by Lanford Wilson, directed by Dennis L. Dalen (Ohio University School of Theatre, 1989)
Is there no balm in Gilead? Is there no physician there?
- Jeremiah 8:22
“‘Disintegration’ is the best album ever!”
- Kyle Broflovski, South Park
Nineteen Eighty-Nine was the greatest year in musical history. This is a point of some debate, but I know it to be true. Psychologists have explained that each individual believes the music released in one’s twenty-first year will generally be regarded as superior to all others.
But come on, Paul’s Boutique, Three Feet High and Rising, Deep, Pretty Hate Machine, I could go on. Disintegration is indeed the best album ever, and well describes my own psyche at the end of my third year in college, when it was released.
I had gone from second-year golden boy to third-year pariah, and started my fourth-year in perhaps the most mentally correct place I have ever found myself. I learned that I need to get my professional shit together and was ready to just bear down and work until graduation.*
The undergraduate production that fall was Balm In Gilead by Lanford Wilson, a production which opened thirty years ago tonight. An ideal play if you want to cast as many people as possible, Wilson’s work is a hipster fantasia taking place in and around a twenty-hour diner frequented by the addicted, sex workers, and also thieves, hustlers, and criminals.
Joe (Peter Voinovich) and Darlene (Susan Hobrath)
All my best friends, my contemporaries, were in this production (except Jules, who was across the alley, performing in Hurlyburly) and we all underwent a deep, focused investigation of the world of heroin users, expending the kind of time on research that was so plentiful at school, even if we were unaware of it.
We had scheduled a meeting with a therapist at the campus addiction recovery center. I knew absolutely nothing about heroin, save for having watched Sid & Nancy. What I learned became quite valuable, as I will soon point out.
We did not need to study the time period, because director Denny Dalen did not set it in any specific time period, or to be more accurate, we were each from different eras, as though we were walking through some kind of purgatory.
Larry was a 70s street hustler, with picked out Afro, Pete a Miami Vice styled wannabe kingpin in a blazer and T-shirt. Ricky in all-white disco attire, Susan a 60s flower-child, Lisa a hard-boiled 1950s waitress with small apron and snood.
Me, I was the narrator, an addict named Dopey in a mid-80s Deep Purple T-shirt and a high school varsity jacket. My long hair ratted out and my first real beard, I have deeply warm feelings about this costume. Much love to designer Tavia DeFelice.
The script is very challenging to read, as several conversations can be happening at once. You had to say your line in the order it appears on the page, but you might be responding to something someone said three lines back. But the more we did it, the more we heard it, and the more it became like a kind of word jazz.
I remember the week leading up to opening was particularly tough. Denny had something for everyone, and more for some than others. The underclassmen were a pain, as they debated every observation Denny had for them, responding with some explanation for how the way they were doing it made sense.
There's a saying. "Take the note." Don't argue with me. Do it.
One night, before we started in with notes, someone speculated on how long notes were going to go, and how wearying it all was.
Self as Dopey
“Not for David,” said one of the second-years. giving me the side-eye. “He never gets any notes.”
I was a little too quick to respond. “No, I don't. But if I did I’d be sure to pitch a fit about them.”
It got better. Denny was not happy with the penultimate dress, and everyone knew it.
He said, “David is the only person on this stage who knows where he’s coming from and where he’s going to,” or words to that effect.
I don't usually remember compliments, but I remember that. A couple years ago, when posting about Greg Vovos' play, How To Be a Respectable Junkie, I recounted my experience in preparing for this play, and how close study of the text and an understanding of the effects of heroin made it possible for me to pick apart the threads of conversation and develop a clear map of (as the man said) where I was coming from. Where I was headed to.
So yeah, I was proud of myself, for being the professional, for embodying a whole character and being confident about it. It has been a very long time since I have had the opportunity to dive so deeply into a character.
But the whole production was like that, it was practically immersive. Balm was staged in the Forum, a deeply thrust stage. The set (Daniel N. Denhart, designer) inspired by Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks, the non-present walls of the diner clearly defined by light (James A. Gage, designer) all organey warm inside, and bluishly cold out.
The script is a symphony of despair, one that repeats night after night, as we lounged about the set, crouching in corners, shivering, when we weren’t on. Smoking live cigarettes. Spitting.
DOPEY: (turns to face the audience) Are you getting any of this?
And who knows. Maybe I could have been an actor.
"Balm In Gilead" by Lanford Wilson and directed by Dennis L. Dalen, at the Forum Theater at Ohio University, November 3 - 11, 1989. *Side Note: Fall Quarter 1989 I had roles in three productions, the mainstage and two fourth year studio plays, whereas all other fourth years were in only two. In addition to Dopey I also played the Fire Chief in Ionesco's "The Bald Soprano" and in Tennessee Williams' "The Gnädiges Fräulein," the Cockalooney Bird.
"Cloud 9" by Caryl Churchill Directed by Deborah Nitzberg Set Design by Fred Duer (Ohio University School of Theater, 1986)
Recently, my wife noticed that I sometimes do not include my role as Artistic Director of Bad Epitaph Theater Company in my biography. Bad Epitaph operated (more or less) from 1999 until 2004. We had many great artistic triumphs, and a few failures. I feel my work as titular head of the company to be its Achilles' heel, and am therefore loathe to cite that responsibility as a credit.
Take for example our production of Caryl Churchill’s Cloud 9 in the year 2000. A fine production, from an artistic standpoint; the direction, performers, all elements of design including original music and sound. Exactly the attention to detail we had been striving for in the eighteen months we had been working together as a team.
And audiences stayed away and we lost all the profits we had raked in from our acclaimed production Lysistrata. What happened?
To answer that question, I need to go back to my first semester at college.
For every theater artist there’s that show you saw that changed everything, that made you realize the full potential of what theater could be, and why it is an art form unique from all others. For me, that was Cloud 9.
First produced at the Royal Court in 1979, with a Broadway run in 1981 at the Theatre de Lys, (now the Lucille Lortel) Churchill’s work was part of the 1986-87 Season at the Ohio University School of Theatre. It was produced in repertory with Cat On a Hot Tin Roof.
Now get this: I was a freshman. I had decided to pursue a degree in acting. As a child my parents had taken me to plays and to musicals, which each seemed very different to me. I liked musicals and found a lot of plays to be boring. Not necessarily unenjoyable, just not exiting. And yet I wanted to perform in them.
Today I love watching plays, and do not find performing in them to be enjoyable. We change.
Of course, my knowledge of what a play is was quite limited. So many of the works I had seen at local theaters or performed in at high school were not new. You Can’t Take It With You. Blithe Spirit. The Importance of Being Earnest. The works of Shakespeare. To my mind, that was the majority of work an actor would do, the canon.
From left: Matthew Glave, Kevin McCarty, Alana Beth Lipp Costume Design by William Anderson
All incoming freshman were required to take Introduction to Theatre Criticism, led at that time by the legendary Al Kaufman. A very important course, especially for a callow youth like myself, we learned the language of artistic evaluation. You like it (or you don’t) but can you articulate why?
We were told to read Cat On a Hot Tin Roof before attending the performance, but not to read Cloud 9. How does reading a play beforehand color your reception of the work? How does coming to the work without expectations?
Like a lot of my classmates, we were disheartened by this production of Cat On a Hot Tin Roof. It wasn’t very good. Some performances were downright awful. Was that all right? Could we say that? Al assured us that we could.
I became concerned about the next four years. Is that what this school has to offer?
Then I saw Cloud 9. And my head burst open.
In brief, this play is a satire on British colonialism and mores and how the past is never past. Churchill plays with form, setting the first act in 1880s in Africa, and the second act in 1979 in London … but to the characters, members of one British family and those in their community, it has only been twenty-five years.
This gap in time is not explained. It just is, and no one questions it.
It begins as some kind of British farce, the gender reversals (mother played by a man, the young son played by a woman) easily dismissed as a kind of funny panto. That is, until the highly-anticipated arrival of a famous explorer breaks the thin veneer of gentility. He attempts to seduce the mother, then the son, and finally gains his satisfaction with the African servant Joshua.
“Shall we go into the barn and fuck?” asks the explorer, and they bound off, hand-in-hand. It was hilarious, and shocking, and a release. And my idea of what theater could be changed forever.
I was stunned by the play’s frank use of language, and how it addresses issues of homosexuality, feminism, domestic abuse, drag, pedophilia, incest. But the play also created in me a deep sense of longing, desire, and disappointment. If the first act was arch comedy, the second act was more troubling, as the now-adult children, freed from Victorian restrictions, struggle to understand who they are.
What did it all mean? I did not have the words, the experience to express the feelings this production aroused in me. It was 1986. I was just eighteen years old.
From left: Kevin McCarty, Cynthia Collins Alana Beth Lipp, Joseph Hulser
In the middle of the second act, the company breaks the fourth wall to sing to the audience, a song called "Cloud 9." In this production, the lyrics were in acapella harmony, like a street corner, doo-wop melody.
The wife lover’s children And my lover’s wife Cooking in my kitchen Confusing my life
And it’s upside down when you reach Cloud Nine.
It was a sexy-sassy rendition, and I was jealous. I wanted to be them. The actors, I mean, I wanted to be performing in a show like that.
More troubling to me now are the many difficult turns my personal life was about to take and I wonder if I missed the lesson of the story, that liberation does not necessarily make us happy.
In the New York Times, Frank Rich called Cloud 9 “sentimental agitprop,” and while he didn’t mean that kindly, I wish I had had those words to include in my essay for Dr. Kaufman. As a playwright, I have become a champion of sentimental agitprop. It's what I do.
Moving ahead twelve years, I developed a desire to direct a production of Hamlet with all those artists I had met and grown close to during the previous several years. And maybe someday I will write about that production.
In brief, it was a success. We decided to produce a new play, Sin by Wendy MacLeod, and also the first Cleveland production of The Santaland Diaries, both successes. Finally, in spring 2000 we produced Lysistrata, which was a huge success.
I was happy to skip from production to production under the banner of Bad Epitaph, after Hamlet’s warning not to offend actors; “After your death you were better have a bad epitaph than their ill report while you live.” It was a moniker which invited abuse and I was all for it.
From left: Raeleen McMillion, Cynthia Collins Kevin McCarty, Alana Beth Lipp
We were compelled to create a season. I say “we” because I am almost sure I would rather not have done so, better to just produce a play when there’s a play you want to produce. It had worked so far. But suddenly we were in competition — or perceived that we were — by another upstart company, Charenton Theater Company, a name even more pretentious than our own.
Charenton’s first few offerings were mid-to-mid-late twentieth century classics like Waiting for Godot and American Buffalo. Works that say, “I haven’t read a play since college.”
And what did I do? I chose to kick off Bad Epitaph’s first full season with the most memorable play I had seen in college, Cloud 9.
Thirty years ago this fall, I played John Polidori in the Ohio University School of Theatre production of Howard Brenton’s Bloody Poetry, directed by Alana Byington
The plot centers on the whirling personal and professional relationships of George Gordon Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, with particular focus on that unusually cold summer of 1816 they spent together at the Villa Diodati. It was there, one evening, after reading Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem "Cristabel" that this trio, Byron’s personal physician -- Polidori -- and Byron’s lover Claire Clairmont, challenged each other to write a ghost story.
Brenton’s work goes on to describe the crippling effects these artists’ attempts to love freely and fight against contemporary social norms of propriety and restraint had on their lives and work. The play also has a lot to say about men who dare to live life on the edge and the women who must deal with the consequences.
John William Polidori F.G. Gainsford, circa 1816
What is only obliquely referred to in this work are the stories created the evening of that fateful writing exercise. Most famously, this was the night Mary Shelley would later claim she arrived at the idea for her novel Frankenstein. Like Bloody Poetry, her classic tale investigates themes of great risk and fantastic achievement, but also issues of abandonment and personal responsibility.
Less well-known is the ingenious idea Byron had arrived at that night; a modern re-imagining of the “vampyre.” Folk tales describe this monster as an outsider, living on the outskirts of society, feeding off blood and human flesh like a ghoul. Byron wondered what it might be like if such a demon could pass as human, even enter society? But he grew tired with his own fragment of a story and set the work aside before it was brought to any conclusion.
His doctor, who fancied himself a writer, had arrived at a story about a skull-headed lady “peeping through a keyhole” (we have Mary Shelley’s word for this) which everyone agreed was dreadful. A few short years later, Polidori chose to appropriate Byron’s idea of a gentleman vampire, producing The Vampyre: A Tale in 1819. The good doctor attempted to exact some artistic revenge on the lord who famously made a habit of crushing him with withering verbal abuse, by creating the rakish Lord Ruthven, a thinly-disguised parody of Byron himself.
The Vampyres: A Play Dobama's Night Kitchen, 1997 Brian Pedaci (right) as John Polidori
The joke was on Polidori, however, as when The Vampyre was first published, it was mistakenly attributed to Byron, a fact which each man found galling.
Then a twenty-year-old student, I researched the person of John Polidori for the performance, surprised to learn I was playing a man my own age. I was taken by not only his own brief unhappy life (he died by suicide at the age of 25) but also the legend of the vampire. Many abortive works I created that school year -- comics, short stories, scripts -- included immature and unfortunate ruminations on suicide. One idea was for a daily comic strip about a modern Polidori who, following a romantic humiliation and contemplating his own demise, is seduced by vampire.
If the idea of a vampire preying upon the despair and near-suicide of a young man sounds familiar, it is because I had started reading Anne Rice’s “Vampire Chronicles.” The comparison to Louis and Lestat was purely intentional. In the following years I would read a few more vampire novels, but not an overwhelming number of them. I was more interested in the vampire as a metaphor than as a romance. More After Dark than Lost Boys. I prefer Throat Sprockets to anything by Poppy Z. Brite.
With director Andrew May On the Dark Side of Twilight, 2010
My infatuation came to a head a few years later after the disillusion of both my first theater company and my first marriage, resulting in the script The Vampyres: A Play. Borrowing directly from Polidori’s tale, and using the name’s of all those at the Villa Diodati, a young doctor (John) enters a goth-themed coffee house, meeting an old crush (Mary) and two preening rockers (George and Percy) who may or may not be actual vampires. There is also a teenage barista named Claire, who is actually my favorite character in the play.
My first full-length work, I threw everything into it and it is one big angry mess. The original songs by Queue Up, however, are killer.
Anyway, ten or so years later, then-Director of Education Daniel Hahn was looking for a touring script to compliment Great Lakes Theater’s mainstage production of Bat Boy: The Musical. I made a mad proposal. The character of Bat Boy is some kind of mutant creature half-boy, half-bat. Its origins may be from the Weekly World News, but the story has much in common with B-level monster movies from the mid-20th century.
What if we created a brief history of the vampire in Western literature in four short plays, each describing a pivotal moment in vampire history? The greatest challenge, as I saw it, was how we could successfully incorporate that most recent trend in vampirism; sparkling. Yes, we would have to acknowledge the most controversial of vampire sagas, Twilight.
My working title was Evolution of the Vampire. Daniel suggested something more evocative. In the first chapter of Bram Stoker's Dracula, Jonathan Harker begins his diary entry, "It was on the dark side of twilight when we got to Bistritz ..." It is a much, much better title.
The four scenes or “arcs” of On the Dark Side of Twilight play out like this:
Arc One represents Polidori’s The Vampyre. Set in 1810, we meet Lord Darvell (Byron’s vampire) and the callow Aubrey Porlock; his Christian name taken straight from the good doctor’s short story, his last a combination of Polidori and Orlock, the main character in F.W. Murnau’s silent film Nosferatu.
(It's is also a nod to the author of "Christabel," who ostensibly made all of this possible. A “person from Porlock” interrupted Coleridge as he was feverishly writing "Kubla Khan.")
Aubrey Porlock and Lord Darvell (Dusten Welch & self)
As they travel the Continent together, Aubrey is set upon by a monster while trying to complete an assignation in the woods with a local girl named Xanthe, and neither he nor Darvell are ever heard from again.
Arc Two is an homage to Dracula, the text which set so many rules of vampirism (death by sunlight, aversion to garlic and mirrors, etc.) Here, at the turn of the twentieth century, a young society couple entertains a strange eastern lord who turns out to be Porlock, now a vampire himself, returning to London after nearly a century.
This scene includes a silent coda, a tribute to Murnau’s film, in which the “count” is tricked by his prey into feeding until sunrise.
Arc Three, set in the mid-1980s, is inspired by the work of Anne Rice. With her works, a vampire is now someone to be understood, one to be sympathized with. He is our hero. A fledgling vampire named Edwin is interviewed in New Orleans and we learn that his master is none other than Porlock, who has survived and immigrated to the Americas.
Arc Four, present day. Edwin passes as a teenager in an Alaskan high school. A romance develops between he and a fellow student named Lucy. Their time together is cut short by the arrival of Porlock, who receives his final rest at the hands of an old (very old) companion.
Edwin and Lucy (Dusten Welch & Emily Czarnota)
The entire package includes a narrator who guides the audience through this two-hundred year journey by sharing found materials in the manner that Dracula is composed entirely of diaries, letters, newspaper articles, and other contemporary accounts.
Written to be performed by a company of three (though it could also accommodate a company of up to twelve or more) the premiere production was directed by Andrew May. I performed the older male roles, Dusten Welch the younger, and all of the female roles by Emily Pucell Czarnota.
Working with Emily for the first time with this production was a life-changing experience, and over the next several years she originated performances in several of my works, including The Mysterious Affair at Styles, and the short play The Schoolboy (part of the Seven Ages anthology.) Most meaningful to me, I wrote for her the part of Beatrice in Double Heart, her wit and delivery foremost in my mind when composing verse lines for this younger iteration of Shakespeare’s great romantic heroine.
Emily as Xanthe On the Dark Side of Twilight, 2010
In performance, On the Dark Side of Twilight is chilling, creepy, knowing, and also very funny. Plain Dealer theater critic Tony Brown found it "hysterical, campy fun." But is has a deeper relevance, as vampire tales have always been allegories, reflections of the fears and taboos of the time.
Polidori's short story portrays the struggle between propriety and the evils of Byronism. Stoker's is a thinly-veiled examination and reflection of sexual repression and xenophobia. Anne Rice created a homoerotic romance at the dawning of the AIDS crisis. And Stephenie Meyer brought the story full-circle, creating a novel aimed directly at teenage girls to promote and champion morality, chastity, self-delusion, and male dominance through emotional and sexual abuse.
On the Dark Side of Twilight tackles all of these issues, while remaining brisk and compelling, a compact and humorous horror story that would make an excellent high school, college or community theater production.
This entry is adapted from a piece originally composed in Spring, 2008. The source material for the work that is the subject of this piece was a comic strip I created for The (Ohio University) Post for two quarters in early 1988.
In spring 1988 (before the strip concluded) Scott K. asked for material to
use in his radio production class. I adapted the original
short story for which I created a character named "Kael" -- something I wrote freshman year -- into a brief script
for his radio production class.
The story involved Kael and a mysterious woman
named Carolyn with whom he was "psychically linked." Yes, very
romantic. I wrote a paper on astral projection senior year in high
school and used a lot of the business I picked up during interviews as
the basis for my nonsense.
Scott produced the piece
which featured himself, Ben D., Monique W., Andrea W. and myself. Kael was played by a friend of Scott's whose
name I forget, but I remember his face (which you cannot see in this
picture) because he was the drummer in The Humbert Humberts in Springfest series of strips.
Photo: Does the pose look familiar? See below.
As
my junior year progressed, I became increasingly obsessed with my comic, which was cancelled without explanation at the end of the school year. I decided to propose a studio production of an
adaptation of the Carolyn story, crossed with the Bob/Barbara series for
Spring quarter, 1989. So, in addition to performing on main stage in a
small role in Romeo & Juliet and a core acting
requirement of a Shaw one-act with an MFA director, I was offering to
not only write, but direct my first play at O.U.
The
faculty actually called me in for a meeting - just me and all of my professors and advisers, where they told me they didn't think I could manage this. I
told them I could. Somehow I convinced them. I do not know how.
Having
almost suffered a nervous breakdown in fall 1988, this turned out to be
the best thing that could have happened to my psyche. I had little
sleep, but I spent all my time dedicated to these three productions (skipping Elvis Costello at Mem Aud!!!)
learning how to take effective, ten-minute naps, and just having
absolutely no social life whatsoever. It kept me out of the apartment,
in which the atmosphere was entirely toxic at this point, and that was a
good thing, too.
My friends were sick of the strip. When the
play was accepted into the spring playwrights' festival, one said, "Good, good. And then will you drop it?"
Did I deserve that? Of course I did.
Promo photo by Sal, which was duplicated on stage for pre-show (see below.)
The
play takes place during the same period as the strip - spring 1988. I
even incorporated some text from the practice strips I did in 1987 as a flashback.
Our cast consisted of fellow school of theater people like David L. as
Simon, Nancy F. as Cheryl, and Jill C. as Barbra and Carolyn. That's
right, one woman played both love interests because all women are the
same woman ... except Cheryl, who is just a doormat. This was something
I became embarrassingly aware of during this process, my inability to
write women.
We also met some non-theater majors who
always wanted to try acting, like Jon M. as Wilson (a big, TALL,
imposing Wilson) and the unbelievably awesome Ron C. as Bob. Scott
appeared as Roger, which was fabulous because he not only did the best
impression of himself, but he also played guitar between scenes in "The
Tavern" with drummer Keith H., who we all met through the radio program Sunday
Progressions on WXTQ.
And finally, casting Kael. Originally I
had promised to role to a good friend. But I discovered very late in the game that due to his poor studies, he had been banned
from performance for the year.
Photo: Final dress, from left: Drummer Keith, Ron heading to front door, Brendan on couch, Jill and Jon at right. Note Keith's Church T-shirt.
Instead, a friend suggested Brendan M., who I had met at School Kids
Records. Not an
actor, Brendan was quiet and unassuming, and not at all the type I would
have imagined as the lascivious twerp from the strip. He was
sweet, slinky, and game.
Keith and Brendan met through this production, and shortly afterward formed the band Bingo Smith, for which Brendan played bass.
The
most important member of the team was my stage manager, Maiharriese.
I'd never had a stage manager before. I didn't know what they could do
for you. She took full responsibility for assembling a team of artists
to do the tech work, which shocked me because I figured I would be doing
all of that because, well, who else would?
I was a junior. In the theater department. I still had no idea how these things worked.
The space was what was used to be called the "Little Theatre" in Kantner Hall,
which was a tiny, proscenium stage with a working curtain and fifty
seats fixed in position facing the stage. In the early 90s it was
remodeled into a proper, fully-flexible black box, much more suited to a
professional theater school.
The
big question was whether or not anyone would see it. Sure, my fellow
theater chums would, and that might be enough. There was no money to be
made, these were free performances, open to anyone, it's a school,
after all. But few outside our community generally attended these
studio productions, if they even knew about them.
Opening night, Sunday, May 14, attracted about half a house. That was good. But the next day, there was a photo in the A-News
of Brendan as Kael lying on the floor from an overdose of
muscle relaxants. That afternoon, we had to turn people away.
For what was supposed to be our final performance on Tuesday, there were enough people in the
courtyard to fill another house. And so we were given permission to
announce an additional performance the next afternoon.
None
of this suggests the show is any good, just that there was real
publicity for it. Even THE POST was caught off-guard, reading in the
A-News that a comic strip from their paper had been turned into a play.
They sent a photographer for the final performance and I
got an interview out of it, after the show had closed, which was a delightful vindication.
In
addition to directing, which I was terrible at (pacing was really slow) I
did all the graphic designs myself ... stand-ups of the characters, the
Peter Gabriel and Cure posters, The Tavern logo, all life-size. I
remember working on the floor of the Little Theater, by myself,
listening to Oranges & Lemons, Three Feet High and Rising, Disintegration and the soundtrack to The Last Temptation of Christ. Vanessa's costumes were just perfect in spite
of her working against the fact that so many of my characters wore
nothing but jeans and white T-shirts. Bob's chino-commando outfit was
particularly brilliant, and Ron wore it so well.
By the
time it was through, I guess I really was ready to "drop it." And I
had made it through the most taxing quarter of my career at O.U. getting
As in every course - except R&J for which I got a B+ because I
missed one costume call. Or because I am a terrible actor. Who cares, it was twenty-five fucking years ago.
Through Facebook I have managed to reconnect with many of the original company members.
"The third Compass to play St. Louis, again at the Crystal, was produced in the spring of 1962 and featured Jack Burns and Larry Hankin … Hildy Brooks (then known as Hilda Brawner), Martin Lavut, and Maggie Sullivan under the direction of George Sherman.” - Jeffrey Sweet, "Something Wonderful Right Away"
When I was enrolled at Ohio University, the head of the MFA Directing Program was George Sherman. It is a shame I did not return to O.U. to receive a Masters in Directing from him before he retired. Though I only took one course from him, he was a strong presence at the school, and I had great respect for the work he drew out of those in his program. He had a big smile, and a wonderful snorting laugh.
The one course I did take was in improvisation. Freshman year we received basic improv training from Denny Dalen, geared more in the direction of “club” improv. Though I grew remarkably as a performer under Denny’s tutelage, improvisation was George’s domain, and I soaked in experience during that one quarter course which has served me for the past twenty and more years.
However, it was before working with him that I got the idea to interview him for a paper I would write about improv for Mel Helitzer’s comedy class. It was probably Denny who suggested the idea, informing me that George had once been a member of The Second City, which is not entirely accurate. It was George who first told me of The Compass Players. Following the success of the Compass, and its offspring The Second City, branches of each opened in other cities through the late fifties and early sixties (and even today in the case of Second City).
Compass originator David Shepherd had started a Compass in St. Louis in 1957 at the Crystal Palace, which went bust soon after. They tried again in 1959, and again it did not last long. And again in 1962. And that is where George comes in.
I never did finish my paper on improvisation. I did interview George in early 1989, and he was very informative and interesting and spoke of many things I did not at that time understand. If a microcassette recording of the interview exists somewhere in my home, I have no idea where it is. But I recently found the notes, and they are spare but kind of interesting.
((These are not exact quotes, but reconstructions based on 23 year old notes.))
George Sherman
QUESTION: So, tell me about your work with Second City.
ANSWER: I wasn’t a member of The Second City.
QUESTION: Oh, uh, but I thought …
ANSWER: I was a director for the Compass Players. The Compass Players started in the late 40s or early 50s at a saloon near the University of Chicago by David Shepherd and Paul Sills. Shepherd was the intellectual of the bunch, in 1962 he started a branch of the Compass in St. Louis, we rehearsed in a big, airy basement. There was Alan Alda, Hildy Brooks, Jack Burns, Diana Sands …
Shepherd would create the premise for a scenario, we would perform object work, and create characters. He’d give us a place and time -- for example, in 1961 Jackie Kennedy gave the people a televised tour of the White House, that is a true story. So Hildy created a scene where she played Nina Khrushchev as this motherly type giving a tour of the “Red House” in Moscow, or what have you.
QUESTION: This was an improvised performance?
ANSWER: No. It was developed in a workshop. Everything -- everything you see at Second City today, for example, it is all finished material, developed in a workshop.
{{2011 QUESTION: So, David Shepherd had a hand in the 1957 St. Louis Compass? Did he attempt to make it a “people’s theater”? What role did class and politics play in your work?
ANSWER: (Janet Coleman, “The Compass”) “Shepherd found … producer’s chores, as usual, unfulfilling. He was in a hurry to get back to scenario writing … he did not bear in mind Grotowski’s precept: the theatre belongs to whoever is making it.”
ANSWER: (Del Close, “The Compass”) “I’d had enough of his bullshit about ‘you’re an upper-middle-class housewife in love with a middle-class white-collar worker with lower-class parents.’ As soon as he left, things began to work.”}}
QUESTION: Where did the Compass perform?
ANSWER: We performed at the Crystal Palace in St. Louis. Hildy, Jack … Larry Harkin, he was tall, beautiful, not verbal, Martin Lavut ... Lavut was quite knowledgeable, good with verbal styles.
The comedy comes from character. There is a sketch we developed that is still used today, the “Van Sketch.” Two people are driving all night in a van, and each tries to keep the other awake. It doesn’t work unless each has a well-developed character and is committed to the act of keeping the other person awake.
QUESTION: When I asked about improvisation in class, Mel said there is no such thing as improvisation. Robin Williams, Jonathan Winters, they prepare everything, it’s all a shtick, it’s all written and planned and they spring it on the audience and it looks like it came from nowhere.
ANSWER: Don’t tell me Jonathan Winters doesn’t improvise. In 1960 or something, he was cutting promos for a show, they just let the tape run for three or fours hour, huge improvised reams of tape. Sure, much of it would end up in some act. But he starts with, he draws on a character. And he can go anywhere.
Bert Lahr said “a comic says funny things, a comedian says things funny.” That is what makes a comedian more endearing than a teller of jokes. The Smothers Brothers routine couldn’t exist without it having grown out of their genuine relationship.
QUESTION: But I am confused. Is a Second City performance improvised or isn’t it?
ANSWER: Early in the week we would have improv sessions. Tuesday, Wednesday night, for people willing for something different. This would be pure improv. What works becomes polished in rehearsal. For the Saturday midnight show, everybody knows everything. We’d use lights to control the bits, wherever the scene was, we would end it on a huge laugh by taking the lights out.
If the show was dying, we’d dim the lights slowly. Lavut was hilarious, he refused to quit and the scene would become about the power going out.
The main show is rehearsed, out of free-form work. We did not think it was fair for people paying top price to receive the rehearsal itself.
... and scene.
Sources: Something Wonderful Right Away (Jeffery Sweet) The Compass (Janet Coleman)
UPDATE: George Sherman died in Athens, Ohio, at the age of 92 and surrounded by his family, on July 5, 2024.
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