Double Heart: Dance Call

 Soldiers, we!

Tonight was a big, exciting night! There were racks of costumes waiting for us, and we tried on everything. Also, too: this show is a romance, yes it is. And that means dancing. Choreographer Carli Taylor-Miluk arrived and we spent the night merrily learning folk dance moves and creating our the saturnalia gay to celebrate the soldiers, or what have you, does there really need to be a reason for a party?


"Double Heart (The Courtship of Beatrice and Benedick)" is available from YouthPLAYS.

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.

The Times: Revelation

No, this is new. I cannot remember having two plays in production at the exact same time. While Double Heart rehearsals continue in a vacant office downtown, rehearsals for These Are The Times are happening in a vacant office in Lakewood.

I would love to be in two places at once. Hell, I would love to be in ten places at once. Did I mention my daughter turns 10 tomorrow? Yes, I am all over the places. In my head. But I cannot attend many Times rehearsals.

Tonight, however, I was able to join them. And good Lord, when was the last time I was a playwright just sitting and watching and listening and thinking? Not also directing, or more likely acting, but just getting to witness my own piece?

Oh, wow. I just got that. I am going to have to watch this one. I mean, I get to, but I also have to, I won’t be distracted by also being on the stage. It’s been a long time. It’s scary. It’s exciting.

Double Heart: In Verse

Our lively company.

Lisa had us on our feet last night. Two days of table work and now we're blocking. Yes! Welcome to the outreach tour. We open in seventeen days.

Verse is a game. I don't know much about poetry, and am hardly any kind of Shakepearean scholar, I just know what comes naturally to someone who like Shakespeare, reads it, reads about it, directs it and has occasionally performed it over the course of two decades. But that doesn't make me a scholar, those people are nuts.

When Stephen Sondheim released the first part of his two-volume work on his work, Finishing the Hat, I heard and saw him on Terri Gross and Stephen Colbert to talk up the book. When asked how he writes lyrics, the first thing he said -- before getting into how he thinks, or what he feels, or what it means -- he said he uses a thesaurus and a rhyming dictionary. 

This was a revelation to me! Even now, knowing what I do about writing, I assume that it's all supposed to spring fully-formed from your forehead. Using a dictionary? That's like cheating or something, you're supposed to already have all those words in your head already.

Sondheim said he also uses alcohol, but that doesn't work for me, it makes me go to sleep.

And so, for three weeks last April, I had my thesaurus, my rhyming dictionary, the history of human endeavor, and ten fingers to which to count da-DUM-da-DUM-da-DUM-da-DUM-da-DUM.

Of course, I would never have thought I could even attempt to write a play, even a short one, entirely in imabic pentameter if it were not for the work of Kirk Wood Bromley. During the 1990s and early 21st Century he and his company Inverse Theater created acclaimed modern verse plays with such awesome titles as Lost Labors' Loved, The Bangers Flopera, Want's Unwisht Work and The Death of Don Flagrante Delicto. 

Ray McNiece is Johnny Freeman.

Bad Epitaph produced his great history play The American Revolution in 2004, a work which takes the towering figure of George Washington off his pedestal to show him as a real person. References in this work alone include nods to Henry V, Othello, Macbeth, and every clown in Shakespeare crossed with Zonker Harris in the character of Johnny Freeman; coward, super-patriot.

I am not saying my work compares with Bromley's, because it does not. What I am saying is, his audacious example said to me, Please proceed, Gov'nor.

Double Heart: Commencement

We have arrived!

Throughout the holidays and on into the sudden bright harsh winter cold, I feel as though I have been in a creative holding pattern. The last several days, all three projects of the new year have opened themselves up, like a pale, fragile bloom pushing through deepest snow.

You like that? I am a writer.

Rehearsals for Double Heart began on Wednesday night, and yes it's true: I enjoy listening to people talk about my work as though I were Shakespeare. Just yesterday afternoon, set designer Terry Martin called me into the rehearsal hall to share the set he and his team just assembled there, and to describe to me exactly how it will come apart to pack into the van for the tour.

We are in Messina!

The set is elegant, simple, highly attractive, and will be perhaps the lightest, simplest to pack and move of any set we have used since 2009 when the Chekhov plays utilized the pipe and drape and four pieces of furniture.

Rehearsals for These Are The Times have resumed in earnest. The Big Box series began last weekend, and our historical Cleveland pageant is the final weekend, but that still seems awful close with so much to do ... until I think I need to rehearse an entire other play, tour it and wrap it up before Times even opens. That puts things in perspective. At least it does for me.  

More wonderful still, I threw out eleven pages of Slumberland to be read aloud during Playwrights Unit on Wednesday. Not such a big thing in the large picture, to have a few odd pages read, but there is something warm and reassuring about knowing what you wrote -- especially when it is packed with dream-shifting nonsense -- is something people can follow, holds their interest, even makes them laugh, and wanting to hear more.

So far it is, as Eric S. put it, "True to its own world." I think that is something I am good at.

"I am afraid of this performance."

We had a brief discussion about plot, and how plot can or cannot work within a dream. The first stage things are just "happening" with little rhyme or reason, though there is a goal, a basic goal, not an all-encompassing goal, but something to be accomplished before we can move forward. But is Nemo aware of that, or is he just be taken along for a ride? And is that all right?

We commence. We proceed. We move forward, in this and in all things.

Hall of Presidents

One of them.

New Year's 2011 my family and my folks took a vacation at Disney World. The girl was almost eight, the boy was five and a half. They are each, by nature or nurture, cautious. The boy has a healthy streak of self-preservation; when he senses danger (from perhaps an ominous musical cue) he will choose to remove himself from a situation to avoid being scared. These things have changed recently, as they each are exposed to the thrills of fantastic literature or movies with a lot of action.

So, it was not a weekend of thrill-rides or anything even approaching a roller-coaster. Even one look at Goofy's Barnstormer was enough to make the girl shake her head and walk away.

We were meeting my parents for lunch at the Liberty Tree Tavern (an 18th century-inspired family dining experience no doubt refreshed from time to time with the blood of tyrants) and had time beforehand to experience what Liberty Square had to offer. Somewhere along the line, however, my wife decided it would be fun for she and the girl to take in the Haunted Mansion.

There was no question that the boy was too young for that. Instead, we chose to explore the Hall of Presidents. Now, I had visited WDW three times before (really? that many?) in 1982, 1990 and 2000. Previously, the idea of watching an animatronic pageant of our white male chief executives struck me as only slightly more interesting than sitting in on a board meeting at British Petroleum.

Roll call of Presidents, early 2008.
Notice the cheers and boos around 2:49

But the boy loves history, like his father. Like his grandfather. And there would be life-size robot puppets. After spinning in teacups and the horror that is woozles (aaugghh ... the woozles ...) sitting in a dark room to watch sounded like the right thing at the right time.

Now, it has been suggested that Walt Disney World is attended largely by white people and international tourists. I am not going to get into any urban legends as to why this might be the case. Perhaps it is enough to say that, upon observation, I did feel that the percentage of people of color attending the parks, at that time, to my unscientific eye, represented something less than the national average, How's that?

However, upon entering the oval-shaped waiting hall for the exhibit, I was immediately struck by something blatantly obvious. The room was full of people, and with African-American and other people of color representing at least half of the crowd. Having never stepped into this exhibit before, I cannot vouch for how popular it usually is. But it was still morning on New Year's Day and the park was not yet at teeming capacity. Was it usually this popular, among a diverse crowd? Or was there something ... different?

Oh, yeah. That happened.

I am not going to make any sweeping generalizations about why this president is different, those are obvious, some might say irrelevant. Our visit was in the middle of Obama's first term, perhaps at the nadir of his popularity (actually, that would come later, in August when it reached something like 38%) and one must be judged on their accomplishments, or their perceived accomplishments, anyway. As the man whose day we celebrate today once said, it's character not color, stupid.

However, when you are being taught the history of America, and at the top of the list of special people whose names you must memorize there are 43 men who look an awful lot alike, and with few exceptions come from backgrounds of privilege, to wit; money, well there are a large number of people who may feel that they have little or no interest in that. Not in general, certainly not on vacation.

But when that small minority or minorities who do make the pilgrimage to Buena Vista, Florida all make a point to see the same attraction, you have to wonder whether or not they are saying, with their feet, this is important. This means something. It's not about him. It's about us.

And they, and me, and so many others, said it again on November 6. Happy Inauguration Day, America.

One footnote ... the Haunted Mansion broke down, stuck in the middle of horrifying exhibits which keep repeating and repeating and repeating. My daughter was traumatized. But it could have been worse. It could have been on It's A Small World After All.

I snorted milk through my nose.

Double Heart: Costume Fitting

 

Pene: hideous dogsbody

Costumes for Double Heart are designed by Great Lakes Theater costume shop manager Esther Haberlen, who is all kinds of totally damnright awesome. Let me tell the story again, for those not paying attention ...

We first collaborated for the tour of On the Dark Side of Twilight, which had a cast of three actors who, over the course of one hour, play twelve characters. The story spans 200 years, and so the challenge was to create a wide variety of historical looks, that in many cases looked expensive and chic, and could be thrown on and off in a manner of seconds, with or without assistance.

From "On the Dark Side of Twilight"
The Count, upstaged by a dress.

I'm not even going to mention how incredible the wigs are. Esther has designed every tour since, including last year's Mysterious Affair at Styles, though I did grow and maintain my own mustache.

For Double Heart, our two protagonists, Beatrice and Benedick, wear (mostly) the same thing throughout. However, I have the dubious honor of playing four characters, and in some cases I must walk off as one and right back on as another. My pain is Esther's pain.

Who wrote this thing?

 

Don Pedro: upstanding officer

Did I mention the hats? The hats are just outstanding. I get to wear that hat!

Just a little background ... Double Heart, as written, takes place in the mid-16th century, some fifteen years or so before the events of Much Ado About Nothing. At that time, Italy was still largely a number of city-states, and had recently gone from French "protectorate" to that of Spain. Part of the story involves a large and successful sea battle against the Ottoman empire, part of  series of military events which lead, eventually, to the idea of Italy as a single nation.

However, as Esther informed me, the dress at that time was a great deal less colorful, and for the purposes of our production she moved her design two hundred years later. Part of that inspiration came from Kenneth Branagh's 1993 film version, which is also modeled on Italy of the 18th century.