opens tomorrow
To order tickets just go to: http://www.theatermania.com/content/show.cfm/show/122580 or call 212-352-310
1100 Playwright Interviews A Sean Abley Rob Ackerman E.E. Adams Johnna Adams Liz Duffy Adams Tony Adams David Adjmi Keith Josef Adkins Nicc...
opens tomorrow
To order tickets just go to: http://www.theatermania.com/content/show.cfm/show/122580 or call 212-352-310
The original 1st scene of a play I'm working on. i'm not going to use this at all because I decided we shouldn't ever hear god. but here is the rejected 1st scene followed by another scene i can't use at all.
(JULIUS sits on a beat-up couch. He stares at a television and holds a video game controller in his hand. He is playing furiously. JULIUS is dressed hipster sloppy, and it may take us a second to notice his large pointy ears, the only clue to us that he is an elf. )
(We watch JULIUS play for a while and then a booming voice interrupts.)
VOICE OF GOD JULIUS!
JULIUS (not looking up) What?
VOICE OF GOD JULIUS! This is your Lord.
JULIUS Who?
VOICE OF GOD This is God speaking. Can I get your undivided attention?
JULIUS (Putting down his controller, looking around.) God?
VOICE OF GOD Thou hast been chosen.
JULIUS What?
VOICE OF GOD Thou art the chosen one. I come onto you to tell you I have chosen you.
JULIUS For what?
VOICE OF GOD You are he.
JULIUS Who?
VOICE OF GOD He!
JULIUS Who?
VOICE OF GOD HE!
JULIUS Well what does that mean?
VOICE OF GOD Dont ask questions. Have faith.
JULIUS In what?
VOICE OF GOD In me.
JULIUS Well, OK, but you got to give me a little more information. God! (silence) Hey, God! (no answer) God! God! GOD!!
(JULIUS stares of into space for a minute and then picks up his controller and continues to play his game.)
--------
(Exit ELLIE. JULIUS goes back to playing his game.)
VOICE OF GOD Julius!
JULIUS Oh, Shit! You scared me.
VOICE OF GOD Julius!
JULIUS God?
VOICE OF GOD It is I.
JULIUS God, when you said I was the chosen one, what does that mean exactly? Like Im the most special? Like the most special on the Earth? Is that a fair assessment?
VOICE OF GOD Let me tell you a story.
JULIUS OK.
VOICE OF GOD Once there was a lonely sheep herder who lived in the mountains.
JULIUS What was his name?
VOICE OF GOD Its not important. This sheep herder herded the sheep by day and by night looked up at the stars and wished for something more. One night I sent an angel down to talk to this sheep herder.
JULIUS Why didnt you go talk to him yourself?
VOICE OF GOD Stop interrupting. The angel said unto him, Sheep herder, you will be given a test by God. You will be asked to do something and you must do it without questioning or thinking for yourself. You must prove your love of God and your faith in Him. The sheep herder wanted to know what he would be asked to do but the angel would say no more and flew away.
(Pause)
JULIUS Is that the whole story?
VOICE OF GOD Now Julius, the time has come for you, the chosen one. I give unto you a blessed task to prove you are worthy and to show your love for me and for the universe I created.
JULIUS Oh. Well, I dunno. Im kind of busy right now what with the job search and all and I really had to pick up slack here helping my dad out since my mother died.
VOICE OF GOD Julius, dont bullshit God.
JULIUS Sorry. Do I have the option to say no to your request?
VOICE OF GOD Do you not know that I am your Lord God and that saying no to me might be a very bad idea?
JULIUS All right. (He sighs.) What do you want me to do?
VOICE OF GOD Kill Santa.
JULIUS Wait, what? (Beat) What did you just say? (Beat) God! Hey, God, come back here. (Pause) Why do you keep doing that?
was that there would be so much stress associated with getting some shows up finally. Nerve is without a doubt a success. It's going really well and its almost over and it's freaking me out just a little that it's going so well. i'm so used to the rejection that so many people telling me they like it is kind of confusing and i had no idea that would be the case. Not that everyone liked it. (I've read some reviews now) But most people did seem to really enjoy the play. Which makes me feel great and yet I'm sure i have sent it to probably a hundred theatres which either rejected it or never responded. And i don't understand that.
But I have no time to try and figure that out because now there is all this stress about getting people in for Food For Fish. (opens the 6th. buy your tickets now) And the thousands of other things that have to happen to make it all come together in time. I'm scattered. It's been really hard to rehearse something while something else is going up.
Not to mention that I wish I could leave for a few days and see how Pretty Theft is going in DC. I'm not going to get there until right before it goes up. which means I have to leave in the middle of the Food For Fish run.
Not that I'm complaining. I'm thrilled to have all these productions. It's just sort of disorienting. there are a lot of plays on my shelf. a lot. i hope this burst of shows will lead to some more of them getting done though I'm not sure it works that way exactly. You might have to get a pulitzer before that happens. Although I'm not sure that even a pulitzer will ever make it possible to quit the day job, will it? i wonder what makes that possible.
Mike Boehm Suzan-Lori Parks offers a play a day
http://www.calendarlive.com/stage/cl-et-quick30.2jun30,0,7782431.story?coll=cl-stage-features
Oprah may know how to get the whole country reading the same book, but Pulitzer Prize-winner Suzan-Lori Parks has come up with a way to get it performing the same plays, week after week, for an entire year.
From Nov. 13, 2002, to Nov. 12, 2003, Parks wrote a short play each day. Now comes "365 days/365 plays," conceived and produced by Parks and Bonnie Metzgar. Billed as the largest theatrical collaboration in U.S. history, hundreds of theater companies around the nation will team to make sure that each play is staged on its fourth birthday or at least during its birthday week starting Nov. 13, 2006.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/29/washington/29cnd-scotus.html?pagewanted=2&ei=5087%0A&en=016f4299710789ee&ex=1151812800
In the courtroom on Thursday morning, the chief justice sat silently in his center chair as Justice Stevens, sitting to his immediate right as the senior associate justice, read from the majority opinion. It made for a striking tableau on the final day of the first term of the Roberts court: the young chief justice, observing his work of just a year earlier taken apart point by point by the tenacious 86-year-old Justice Stevens, winner of a Bronze Star for his service as a Navy officer during World War II.
Nerve closes on the 1st.
Food For Fish opens on the 6th.
Hope you can come.
I'm very happy with the Nerve production and very happy with how rehearsals are going for F4F. And they are VERY different kinds of plays. One is nothing like the other so I think assumptions about one based on the other just aren't going to work. The only solution is to see both.
I am in a sort of self-imposed hibernation. Trying to write something new. Trying to see my show--trying to get other people to see my show and trying to go to rehearsals for other show.
I had yesterday and today off and used it to write letters and start a new play--you know that crazy ubu santa thing I've been offhandedly mentioning? Oh, you don't? Remember those crazy pictures a few months back? Well, I'm working on that. And I need to write a one man show and a film. i have what I think is a great film idea and I'm dying to work it through but there are only so many hours in the day and 8 of them are at work (and two of them are to and from work)
and then there are the plays I saw that were great (Dead City, Quail, the new Anne Wasburn...) and the ones I still have to see (off the top of my head, Jason Grote's Walmart play, James Comtois' show, The Most Wonderful Love, Gary Winter play, Hunka play coming up and I'm sorry if I'm forgetting someone. Plays at EST? The Production Company has a bunch of shorts. Did I miss those?) I'm in a fog still.
Food for Fish is loosely inspired by Chekhov's Three Sisters. In the play, "young Bobbie drops pages from his novel into the Hudson River. The pages tell a story of three sisters: a stalker, an agoraphobe and a scientist with a secret plan to isolate and eliminate the gene for love. It is set in a world where men became women and women became men. But how far do you have to bend a gender before it breaks?"
...A current Juilliard Lila Acheson Wallace Fellow, his romantic comedy Nerve recently premiered at the 14th Street Y (where it plays through July 1) and his play Pretty Theft premieres July 22 at the first Annual Capitol City Fringe in Washington DC.
Lawyers for the detainees, human rights groups and legal associations have increasingly questioned whether many of the prisoners can even rightfully be called terrorists. They note that only 10 of the roughly 465 men held at Guantánamo have been charged before military tribunals, and that recently released documents indicate that many have never been accused even in administrative proceedings of belonging to Al Qaeda or attacking the United States.
Advocates for the detainees said they believed the suicides resulted from the deep despair felt by inmates who are being held indefinitely
Eduardo (see post below) encouraged us to write what we were afraid of-- he encouraged us to go someplace scary and to not worry about what our family or friends or lovers would say but to write the individual perhaps strange things that make us unique and to tell the stories that come from us. And sometimes this was successful and sometimes not but I think we were encouraged to write in the realm of dangerous--in other words write the kinds of plays that are not being produced off broadway these days.
And I want to hold onto this but I want to have a play off broadway too. How do we write true and not dampen too much the weirdness about ourselves and still succeed in this theatrical world? It's something I'm wrestling with.
Because I think the audience should be challenged. But does my work even do that? Should it? Is that the way I should be writing and if so how do I go about that? Or am I already writing that way? It's hard to tell from the inside.
I wrote a play called Open Minds that I thought was political and fierce but I couldn't get anyone to do it although it was a finalist in a couple of contests. Was it not a good enough play or did I not send it to the right places or was it in fact too dangerous?
I need to write another dangerous play now. The time has come. I'm too angry at Bush, at where the country is going, too afraid for the future. And then after I'll go back to writing the other kinds of plays I write, about love and relationships and gender roles.
Of course is this really a dangerous play I have in mind? What is it? A political satire/allegory. Will that help at all? Will that change anything or even make me feel better? Does it need to be out there? I want to write the play that needs to be out there.
That's right! It's time for BCTC's 4th annual ten-minute play festival! BUY TICKETS NOW! This year's theme is mating rituals...
We have ten great plays and 21 really talented (and hot!) actors. Comedy...drama...sex...there's something for everyone, every ten minutes. We hope to see you there!
The Mating Game @ the Viaduct Theatre 3111 N. Western Ave. Friday, June 9th - Saturday, June 24th
Performances are Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays at 7:30pm Sundays at 3:00pm
Call 312.409.2010 to make reservations or BUY TICKETS ONLINE!
$15 on Fridays and Saturdays $12 on Thursdays and Sundays
For more info, or to see slide shows from our previous festivals, please visit our website.
Hey! Check out all these people involved with the show! That's a lot. You probably know at least one of them...
Jenn Adams � Torey Adkins � Shea Bredenkamp � Alex Broun � Kate Cares � Kyle Cobb � John C. Davenport � Robert Dennison � Heather Durham � Trey Edge � Marc Friedman � Colette Friedman � Kendall Gray � Andy Grigg � Charles Hall � Jennifer Hawk � Marcus Kamie � Dan Kennedy � Peter Kersten � Anne Korajczyk � Morgan Leavitt � Eric Lee � Kyra Lewandowski � E. M. Lewis � Kate McDermott � Dane Mehringer � Lydia Milman � Firestone Mulvaney � Frank Murphy � Beth Novick � John Oster � Mark Pracht � Lisa Joy Raffety � Sara Ritz � Denise Santomauro � Adam Szymkowicz � Pam Tierney � Bryan White � Carol White
http://www.villagevoice.com/film/0622,nelson,73375,20.html
If Linklater leaves the big questions of his movies to their audiences, how does he think they'll respond when Scanner opens in July and Fast Food in the fall? "You can never prove or predict the cause and effect of anything, whatever its purpose," he says. "When The Jungle was published a hundred years ago, they enacted the FDA. But in today's world, we're more likely to see legislation enacted to prevent us from criticizing the way things are. In Texas, it's against the law to criticize an agricultural producteven though this [fast food] industry is potentially harming us. I guess Fast Food Nation would be immune to this law for being 'fiction.' Or would it? Kind of interesting, isn't it? I mean, can Fox Searchlight enact legislation to prevent you from writing a bad review of my movie?"
You need to see this film. I was a little dissapointed that the message was linked with Gore so much but it's an important film all the same.
Global warming is a real thing and when politicians pretend it isn't they are guilty of causing what could be a huge catastrophe very soon.
Here's what you can do.
sign a petition http://www.stopglobalwarming.org/default.asp
Become active http://www.climatecrisis.net/takeaction/becomeactive/
Help in small ways with large impact daily http://www.climatecrisis.net/takeaction/whatyoucando/
www.climatecrisis.net
The Wasteland ( think of how successful Cats was) Catcher in the Rye, the Musical Long Day's Journey into Night, the long musical The Lord of the Rings X-Men The Sound and the Fury Glengarry Glenross Farenheit 9/11
Girl in long skirt, large brimmed black hat overburdened with bags. sits down on the bench, takes out her cell phone.
--Hi, Mom,. i'm going to make this quick because i'm going to lose reception. Eric is alive. He's at ______ Memorial Hospital. OK. Bye.
I had a great time at the clubbed thumb event last night and met lots of great people and talked to lots of great people I already knew and yet somehow didn't get to meet MattJ. Another time I hope.
But I thought my show went really well and was impressed with those shows I was able to see, many which I was unable to find on the program before rushing off to the next show so I have no idea what I even saw and didn't see for the most part. But damn was it cool.
I love clubbed thumb. And all of you.
Please come to see nerve the first week if you can june 8-11. Did I mention a free beer with every ticket?
www.smarttix.com
I got this email today from a company selling viagra etc. I find it completely insane. Look at the subject of the email. Sounds like a death threat, doesn't it? there's a play in here somewhere, I swear.
Fwd: If you were in the street on fire, I'd put you out with gasoline
ruinerHullo!
upadukadel[dot]com
---- only just married, could not decline the gift. His mother, whohad her own separate property, had allowed Alexey every yeartwenty thousand in addition to the twenty-five thousand he hadreserved, and Alexey had spent it all. Of late his mother,incensed with him on account of his love affair and his leavingMoscow, had given up sending him the money. And in consequenceof this, Vronsky, who had been in the habit of living on thescale of forty-five thousand a year, having only received twentythousand that year, found himself now in difficulties. To getout of these difficulties, he could not apply to his mother formoney. Her last letter, which he had received the day before,had particularly exasperated him by the hints in it that she wasquite ready to help him to succeed in the world and in the army,but not to lead a life which was a scandal to all good society.His mother's attempt to buy him stung him to the quick and madehim feel colder than ever to her. But he could not draw backfrom the generous word when it was once uttered, even though hefelt now, vaguely foreseeing certain eventualities in hisintrigue with Madame Karenina, that this generous word had beenspoken thoughtlessly, and that even though he were not married hemight need all the hundred thousand of income. But it wasimpossible to draw back. He had only to recall his brother'swife, to remember how that sweet, delightful Varya sought, atevery convenient opportunity, to remind him that she rememberedhis generosity and appreciated it, to grasp the impossibility oftaking back his gift. It was as impossible as beating a woman,stealing, or lying. One thing only could and ought to be done,and Vronsky determined upon it without an instant's hesitation: