Costume update

I have the costume plot up on Google Docs. Finally......
If you need it, I'll see that some are printed out at the theater. If you have questions on it, then call me, or write, or carrier pigeon would work. But if you want my undivided attention, then giving me coffee helps.

Great working with you all, this play is amazing.

With every work, each individual involved both leaves a part of themselves with it and also takes something away. A trade is made, a transaction. Somewhere, at some moment, a secret is laid bare. For the creator, be it playwrite, or painter, or architect, the entire work is rife with secrets but those other collaborators leave things, as well. There have been a number of coincidences when it has come to this work.

My coincidence, my secret is within the small monologue I give. It trips me up a bit. I've been where the character is but not so much in a metaphorical way. There weren't any speeches or confessions when I looked upon whom I looked upon. I looked upon a lot. I held a few hands. I carried someone important to me to a waiting helicopter.

There are things that you can not give up. There are also things that you will not give up. Some things sprout from us as from the soil and those roots are so intermingled with us that they will never be pulled out. Others are carved, or burned, or etched. Some are simply locked away and, maybe, not even we, the possessors, know where they are to be found. Some things are ours.

I was planning on saving this picture until the show had run. Sometimes, I think, we are afraid of changing things.
I took this picture on March 28, 2005 while I was driving in Diyala province, North of Baquba. Field after field of yellow flowers. That is the surface of my secret. That surface is what I have added to the play. It is this.

Jason, trying to elicit the secret of old wood.

Joy, Katherine, and Steve - way too early on Sunday morning, 

and Barry hauling chairs for the bulk mailing.

Rehearsal Photos

Neither sleet, nor hail, nor broken heater . . .  

Our SM  Liz

The women who are The Women!

Jenny, Pearl, and Reo

Kelcey and Nils in the first attempt at figuring out Scene Five, and Liz in her monkey hat wondering why she signed on to be a part of this.

The empty space.  

How much of the universe do 100 people hold inside them?  What happens when these people gather together in the same place to bear witness to this?

Beautiful production image by Geoffrey Hartig

wings

The Women watched the Wings of Desire this weekend. We are all deeply moved by this experience. I wrote a little poem about it:

from where I am
I
Imagine you
we are the same
there is no meaning
only love
the source
time is a tool
the material world is a fantasy
we participate
by observing
creating
this dance of light

'The Velveteen Rabbit' Scared Me as a Child

So... little, wooden birds... I've been finding them but, for some reason, there is a dreaful preoccupation with little, wooden ducks. It is as if there is really no reason to make any other sort of bird out of wood except ducks-- and not simply decoy ducks, mind, but ducks in general. And, if not simply that, then, well, basically waterfowl. Maybe there is something about a wooden hummingbird that just does not mesh with the average person's sensibilities. I'll not know, I'll not delve. The mystery is the art of life and, on the great gastronomic scale of things, solving the riddle of the little, wooden ducks is hovering somewhere between generic maccaroni & cheese and soydogs.

Yes, today, life is beautiful for the delicate and trite mystery of the little, wooden ducks and, in general, waterfowl.

And, were I to come across a life-size, wooden albatross, I would, I like to believe, hang it from the living room ceiling of every place I might ever live. But you never ask about it-- or, well, at least, not too seriously. It is well enough that it is free of termites and suspended by strong cables.

Aside, as a kid ignorant of those philosophies that delved into such things, I fancied that all things, even manufactured things, were possessed of a soul. It made the world rich and it made materialism fatally sorrowful, the throwing away of so many things with soul, and purpose, and emotions. Although rather emancipated from this idea by now, I was fiddling with it on my quest for more little, wooden birds today. I pondered the meaning of things. For example, if this thing was made to be used like this and, when used like this, its purpose is to make people happy, then to use it in any other way would be to deny it of its destiny. Being an inanimate thing, bereft of mobility and sense, it is incumbent upon the owner to use it properly so that it fulfills its manufactured destiny.

So, if the purpose of a little, wooden bird is to serve one particular function, to use it for anything else would be tantamount to sin-- the murder of purpose. To sidestep this, we could posit with the same conviction or proof, that the mere creation of the little, wooden bird is, in fact, its purpose and that any use thereafter is moot because its purpose was, simply, its creation. But I am sentimental and ridiculous and there will be, for several reasons (mostly pragmatic), two separate groups of little, wooden birds. That and I spent a good deal of time looking for the group that will not, as it were, 'get it'.

Surfing the melting icecaps

Strange things can happen.  Imagination and reality can mesh sometimes.   Click here.

Time travel

Four degrees outside today and the main heater for the theatre is down.  Wear coats for work call - bring heavy sweaters for rehearsal.  Just so everyone knows, the power sometimes fails in the middle of a performance -  everything plunges into a liquid darkness except for the opaque beam from the emergency light.  But we keep going.  It doesn't matter how broken anything is, we keep going.  Telling stories.  Exploring what it means to be here.  Nineteen years now.  

Van Gogh Tulip Fields

http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/gogh/fields/gogh.flower-beds-holland.jpg

Abbaaaaaaaahtt!!

One of the selfishly fun things that I will take with me from this show is betwixt doctor, priest, and constable-- those particular, and icreasingly rare, moments when, deep in the cogs of dizzying dialogue, all three of us can only feel like, at the same time, we have all dropped the ball. The motion stops and we look one to the other, a sincere question in all of our eyes:

"Who's on first?"

Women Kulning

This is hauntingly beautiful. Although it's Swedish of origin it's so much of the spirit of the Women's chorus in the play.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hyfdkvvzyzQ

Empathy. I think that it is empathy. Those tiny points at which, while... journeying through some piece of art, be it a book, or a play, or an exhibit, the onlooker finds course to remark with a marked, "ahh!" "Ah, yes," "ah-hah," "I know this moment!" "This moment is present in my life (or, "my past," or, "my heart")." And, then, the art stops being something foreign preaching to them, the art is no longer a brimstone Spanish missionary shouting at the Aztecs. The art becomes something alive. The art can become a revelation... an evolution?

"This is where I am (she must know it) and that which follows? Maybe that is something, also." And a hundred little worlds move.

The silent fields

Where do loneliness and aloneness bridge each other? We each have these wild gardens of life growing inside our lives. How much of our inner lives never leave our heads or hearts? How large and complex a universe lives inside you that others will never know?

Staring out the skylight in the middle of these frozen nights - the stars are so intensely bright. Staring up through the skylight running scenarios of worry, or failure, or victory, or tiny, green islands of nirvana. All the silent movies that are made each night across the world, fueled by the heart and the mind, the stillness, the darkness, and the exhaustion. Sometimes, when I can't sleep, I try to imagine how much silence there is out there.

For the past few nights we have been slowly constructing scene three. It begins with monologues, and in a somewhat realistic setting, but gradually turns into movement and sound and rhythm, and ends in a full blown, poetic world. Again, the ideas emerge as everyone labors together, pressing into the uncreated fields of space to find out what might be there. There is nothing more lovely in the world than that.