Sands UK Tour, Day Seven: 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.

Thursday, 14 June 2007

Feedback from the Sands conference on Tuesday!

Out of 98 forms:
Please evaluate, scoring from 4 - 1
( 4 - e x c e l l e n t ; 3 - g o o d ; 2 - f a i r ; 1 - p o o r )

“I hate this” A play without the baby a solo performance – David Hansen
4 - 88.88% 3 - 9.10% 2 - 2.02% 1 - 0%
Comments: Fantastic / Amazing / Awesome/ Inspirational / All nurses should see this/ Unique and exceptional / too intense / too personal

I agree, it is too intense and personal. I'm an intense and personal guy.

In Lincoln, we are staying at the White Hart, which is this ... okay, I have an insufficient vocabulary for things opulent and beautiful. It is enough to say our stage manager refuses to leave tomorrow, and her room is half as nice (and a quarter as large) as ours is.

Lincoln Cathedral

The picture at your right is the view from our window. That's what we get to wake up to and go to be at night looking at.

Last night at dinner at the Wig and Mitre. I noticed a number of photos of Tom Hanks from local papers, laminated and hanging on the wall in the staircase. As I was managing small feet up and down the stairs each time, I didn't read it up close, and just figured Tom Hanks had spent a vacation here.

Well, no. As Westminster Abbey refused to let Ron Howard film the relevant scenes from The Da Vinci Code that take place there in their actual location, the people of Lincoln Cathedral were only too happy to provide theirs as a substitute. And so the entire city played host to a major Hollywood picture for a few days in August, 2005.

This morning the wife and I met with our contact, who took us to the studios of BBC Lincolnshire for a noontime interview. I don't think they were planning to have my wife on the air, but we pressed for it, which I think is a good thing. Like having her participate in the post-show discussions, she provides perspective that I forget ... or have difficulty articulating. I don't know what's happened to me that I have totally lost the ability to answer a simple question in a short period of time.

Our interviewer asked very intelligent and thoughtful questions. I think we got the show over pretty well. There was this amusing exchange where our contact was explaining, quite rightly, that the show is about a serious subject, and that it's not necessarily "night out" material. My wife did her best to also point up that it is still a play, and an entirely appropriate form of entertainment for people who are looking for a good drama.

Our contact got to share with us about her daughter, whom she lost seventeen years ago. She's worked so hard on this mission, has been involved with Sands for many years. One interesting, and potentially helpful anecdote; she had occasion to relocate the meetings she was organizing. They couldn't be at her home, and having them in a church would be problematic. So she hosted it at a restaurant, a kind of a pub. And the attendance of fathers went up dramatically.

She says she believes the possibility of having a drink (to wit; "I'm not going to a support group, I'm having a pint,") was probably what brought them out.

And I think she's right.

Original blog post: June 14, 2007

Cleveland Critics Circle

When the subject of Tom Hanks formative years at Great Lakes Theater (née Shakespeare Festival) comes up, inevitably someone mentions the fact that he won the Best Actor Award from the Cleveland Critics Circle for his performance as Proteus in Two Gentlemen of Verona. But what was the Cleveland Critics Circle?

Before its demise in the late 1980s, the Circle was driven by Cleveland native and Sun Press critic Jackie Demaline (currently chief theater critic at the Cincinnati Enquirer) and its membership included Plain Dealer critic Joanna Connors and Northern Ohio Live's Marianne Evett before she assumed her position at the PD. Also on board were Chronicle Telegram critic Shannon Jewel, Art Thomas of WestLife and Roy Berko. Anyone who wrote criticism that was printed was welcome to become a member.

Their primary purpose as the Cleveland Critics Circle was to grant annual awards to area theater artists, meeting several times a year to debate the merits of all of the local theatrical productions, including productions that toured through Playhouse Square Center. These awards followed the traditional categories of Best Actor/Actress, Best Director, Best Musical, etc.

One interesting point I learned was that in order to have a voice in any given award, you must have seen all of that year's productions. If you hadn't seen every nominated performance in the Best Actress category, for example, you were not permitted to have a say in that category.

At the time of the Circle's disintegration, the Cleveland theater community itself was in the doldrums. With the demise of the Cleveland Press, there was only one daily paper with the facility to employ full-time, professional critics. Cleveland Play House and Great Lakes Theater were the only Equity houses in town, and the grand old days of high-quality, big name, professional drama coming through Playhouse Square were done. Every theater that you think of as a second-tier Cleveland theater (Dobama, Ensemble, Karamu, Beck Center) were either little more than community theater with high pretensions or in a period of awkward transition into the more-respected houses they would become. None of those companies at that time employed professional actors nor paid any of their staff.

This was all before my generation came on the scene, of course. Just saying.

The Cleveland Critics Circle has recently been revived, announcing last week the premiere of a new website Cleveland Theater Reviews. Their mission, as stated, is to "raise awareness and increase visibility of Greater Cleveland's vibrant theater scene." The fact is, there are more Cleveland theater critics now than there ever have been. The difference is, most of their readership is online. Most who are even published in the old fashioned way are carried in community papers with ever-dwindling subscriptions. Providing this website gives those interested in reading theater criticism one-stop to check out what everyone is saying.

Well, not everyone. While papers like the Cleveland Jewish News, the Akron Beacon Journal and various neighborhood Sun papers are represented in their membership, the Cleveland Plain Dealer is not. It has been over nine months since the PD retired their last chief theater critic, and has yet to name a successor, relying instead on writers from other departments. Through posts I have made on this subject other area critics reassured the community that they would take responsibility for filling that gap in area theater coverage. The reemergence of the new Cleveland Critics Circle promises to be positive step in that direction.

On Comedians

"I should be drinking a toast to absent friends
Instead of these comedians."
Elvis Costello
My junior year was the year of comedy. Stand-up comedy. One of the main stage productions that fall at the Ohio University School of Theatre was Comedians by British playwright Trevor Griffiths. In brief, the play is about an older man who teaches an after-hours course in stand-up to working class guys in Manchester. The final exam is a five-minute routine at a local pub.

However, when the instructor’s old partner shows up, a very successful British comedian and talent agent, and announces he is scouting for new talent and will be attending that night’s event, well, that raises the stakes considerably, doesn’t it?

These two men of a certain age have differing opinions about comedy, and its uses. Morecambe and Wise vs. Angry Young Men, don’t you know. The guy in downtrodden, 1970s era Manchester, scraping his living, thinks of comedy as a time-honored art form best employed to divine difficult truths. The other gentleman is about entertainment and money -- If you can get everyone in the room to laugh at the fat kid in the front row, you win!

Also in 1988, when Tom Hanks was still willing to risk playing an asshole, he starred in the film Punchline, which might be my favorite role he’s played. A middle-aged housewife (Sally Field) is having a midlife crisis and wants to try out stand-up. Hanks' character is a moderately successful, workaday comedian, kind of a dick troubled character, and takes her under his wing.

"But doctor ... I am Pagliacci."

Comedians, it turns out, are not happy people. They are bitter, angry people. The best ones can be charming, lose themselves in the content of their “character” and who can cleverly cut down everyone around them but remain adored. Caustic, scorched earth comedians offend everyone and most often flame-out. I don't need to name them. The ones with the longest self-life are beloved, unknowable clowns. Who is Jerry Lewis, Bob Hope, Johnny Carson? Who cares, they’re funny.

That school year was also my year of graphic novels. The daily comic strip I had written during my sophomore year had been cancelled, but as a result of that experience I had begun delving beyond strips and books, and into what Art Spiegelman called “comix.”

Junior year was when I began reading Harevy Pekar, Spiegelman’s Maus and Raw, and Watchmen, an underground comic posing as a superhero book. Watchmen famously features a character called The Comedian, an psychopathic mercenary who plays the American system to the hilt, G. Gordon Liddy with the expertise, style and strength of Batman. He wears the iconic “smiley face” button that is the signature gaphic for Watchmen. It’s also his blood that gets splattered on it.

He's the Comedian. He gets the joke.

The second act of Comedians features all of the younger performers presenting their shtick. To the playwright’s credit (and the ability of the actors) the routines actually do make the audience, the actual theater audience, laugh -- or not, if they are supposed to be lackluster. All the student had been instructed carefully to look into themselves, to find the humor within. When one comedian’s work begins to flag, he starts making racist jokes which are unfortunately hilarious. Win! A team of brothers have a melt-down onstage, however, when one of them tries to pull the same thing in the middle of their act, and the other refuses to.

The final comedian, Gethin Price, is entirely balls-out bizarre. It’s more like performance art, it isn’t "funny", it’s a grotesque lashing out against the upper class. It is COMEDY. I wasn’t in this production, but I was very interested by it, read the script in advance. I had made acquaintance of the guy playing Price -- he was an O.U. Alum, a visiting artist -- and gave him a Watchmen pin I had gotten from the Uptown Mini Maul. He was thrilled, and got permission from the costumer to pin it on costume.

I like comedy. I like funny. I do not like comedians. In general, I find them to be misanthropic, mean-spirited people. And the only thing worse than a comedian is an improv comedian.

To be continued.