J.T. McDaniel's blog

But I Don't Want to be Right

The latest stories suggest that the President wants to amend the Constitution to allow a president to sue anyone he believes has insulted him. At the moment, it's not quite impossible to slander, or libel, a politician, but you have to really try. Presidents have even successfully convinced Congress to pass sedition laws in the past, though never with good results.

Of course, what Trump seems to be proposing is a little different. Sedition is normally thought of as insulting the country itself. It's a bad idea mostly because, as often as not, there's a legitimate grievance involved.

But that's not what Trump's concerned with. He seems to be more interested in getting a law that would allow government officials to sue their critics. That ability has traditionally been limited, with the limits usually extending to candidates for public office, and not just to those actually holding those offices. If it was easy to sue, Hillary Clinton would own several media outlets and the personal fortunes of half my acquaintances.

Of course, people were merely accusing her of murder, treason, and a half dozen other major crimes. Yet she never sued anyone. Accusing your political opponents of being criminals is nearly as old as the country. No one really went after Washington, but from then on presidents were targets.

Trump, on the other hand, is mostly being accused of being an idiot, or acting like a two-year-old. Not that easy to defend against when your first instinct on hearing anything negative about yourself is a twitter blast.

Back at the beginning of his first term, Barack Obama more or less put aside his Blackberry. He did, eventually, take to Twitter once that platform became available, and continues to use it. Obama's tweets, for the most part, consisted of mild national boosterism, and the occasional suggestion that the country might be better off if people would actually work together for the common good. Trump's are mostly, "I really won the popular vote," "Hillary cheated," and "I didn't do that," with a liberal leavening of "so-and-so is a bully," and "I don't care what's right, I won so I should get my way." Of course, Obama is a gentleman and Trump is Gordon Gecko, but in real estate rather than stocks.

Okay, what's this have to do with being right? In Returning, sometime in 2019, enough states are conned into passing "convention of the states" resolutions to convene a constitutional convention. The convention then proceeds to ignore its "official" purpose, which is to propose amendments banning same-sex marriage and abortion, and rewrites the entire Constitution. Among the changes are a unicameral Congress, with everyone serving six-year terms, removing the two-term limit on a president, giving the president the power to create law by executive order, taking the power to declare a law unconstitutional away from the Supreme Court, and adding a new preamble that makes it clear this is now officially a Christian nation, no one else need apply. Part of that was making sure the current constitutional ban on religious qualification for holding office was eliminated.

Potentially, the new Constitution would give America the sort of country that John Calvin would have loved. Or the Pilgrims, who were actually a pretty miserable lot of religious bigots, even if they did generally dress a little better than the traditional Thanksgiving advertising would suggest. If the Puritans and their philosophical descendants had their way, we'd be living in a gloomy, anti-intellectual country.

Not that intellectuals seem to have much place in the current administration. When the chief qualification for heading agencies with a primarily scientific mandate is not believing in science, you can't expect much. If he could get away with it, you can't help thinking Trump would just love to appoint Ken Ham as director at the Smithsonian. Or Jenny McCarthy to run the Centers for Disease Control.

By the time the real action starts in Returning, in 2126, that's more of less what's happened to America. Most people live ordinary lives. The truth is, that's what happens in dictatorships. If you keep your head down and obey the rules, you get along. Maybe you have to be careful what you say, but you get along. They don't round up everybody. They just round up the "trouble-makers." There aren't that many of those, if only because years of careful education have insured that most people believe what they're told. If the Bible suggests that the universe is only 6,000-years-old, and your government assures you this is the case, why would you question it?

After all, the President is a fifth-generation evangelist, so certainly he'd never lie to you. If the President assures you that the reason there are no satellite images of a vast part of Wyoming is because it includes a top-secret military base, then why would you believe rumors they're really hiding a huge concentration camp? Sure, people sometimes disappear, but they just moved away. It's purely coincidental they never write or call.

Now, the reality is that you don't usually get dictatorships through violent revolutions. Spain did, but the Nazis took power in Germany through the normal political process. Truth doesn't matter to authoritarians, because they can make the truth be whatever they want it to be.

I guess I should point out that Returning isn't a political or religious rant. Politics and religion both get sent up, certainly, but mostly it's a bit of space opera, a lot of speculative science, and an entertaining adventure story. And, despite the starship's captain, navigator, and Marine detachment commanders all being women, it's not particularly "feminist," either. The Gehunites got past that stage a long time ago, moving on into what I suppose you could call a humanist phase, where it simply never occurs to anyone to consider sex in deciding who should do what job.

You should read it.

Nearly Done, but the Campaign Rolls On

According to my copy of Word, Returning has reached 56,000 words. So it's officially a novel at this point, albeit, one still lacking the last three or four chapters. I know what happens in them. I just haven't finished writing them yet. 

That won't be the end of it. Once the book is complete I'll need to print it out and go over the manuscript two or three times looking for all those silly little goofs that always seem to creep in. Writing "escape" when you meant "escaped," for instance, or leaving off the odd "ing" here and there. You're also looking for the bigger goofs. It can be a little jarring when you're reading a novel and suddenly realize that the author has lost track of who's talking and has a character answering his own question. 

Naturally, as the basic writing winds down, and the editing starts, I still need people popping in to my Indiegogo campaign. Visiting is nice; donating is nicer. It would be cool if authors could just turn out books on a regular basis and make a living at it, but that only happens to a few, and, so far, I don't seem to be one of those. Maybe I should write about billionaire bondage freaks, huh?

Some of the money raised is going to go toward basic stuff, such as making sure the author eats regularly. That's hard to guarantee, what with paying the mortgage on a house in Georgia and rent on a townhouse in Ohio. It's only in the last year and half or so that the rent on the house has been higher than the mortgage. Logically, I should move back there and stop paying rent up here. I might even do that, but Mom is 91 and I don't really want to move an extra 500 miles further away right now.

That's not the only reason to raise money, obviously. Because of the perks system, any such campaign has a secondary function of selling copies of the book. Depending on the size of the contribution, it could be a Kindle book, a paperback, or even a custom-made leather-bound edition. There are potentially t-shirts, polo shirts, and baseball caps to produce. There's even a $200,000 level (which is a lot to give on a $10,000 campaign), but there's only one of those, the perk is a two-year option on the film rights, and I seriously doubt anyone is going to claim that one. Maybe later, after the book has been published.

I'm going to need a proper cover designed. What's on this post, and the previous one, is probably okay for basic fundraising, but it needs to be better if I want to sell books later. I've got someone working on that, and I'm quite sure he expects to eventually be paid for the job. 

Meanwhile, I suppose it's fair to ask what's happening in the book? Not to it, but in it.

To start off, there's a good deal more back story. Originally, the story started with the astronomer in Greenwich noticing the energy burst when Warrior emerged from jumpspace out past the orbit of Saturn. Now it starts 86,985 years earlier, with the ship getting ready to leave. Then, for a while, it alternates between the ship and events back on earth. A reasonable explanation is provided for the disappearance of an advanced civilization. There is some coverage of the Second Constitutional Convention, which begins the conversion of the United States into the theocratic dictatorship the evangelicals have been trying to bring forth for so many years. 

There are a few jokes that some people will get, and others will wonder about. In 2126 London, Sara Ellsworth is a bit puzzled by a billboard advertising Series 121 of a television show she's never seen, because it's being censored in America by then. The presence of an oddly dressed young actor and a somewhat more conventionally dressed young woman on the billboard may give a hint as to which contemporary BBC program is still around more than a century from now. Two drunks arguing the merits of Number 87 versus Number 92, and anyway, Number 95 is who we've got now, so stuff the others, might be another clue.

Like any novel, this one has a lot of characters. Some appear only briefly. A few are there for a minute or two and then are gone. Doctor Tuttle, the Greenwich astronomer, is one of these. She notices the ship emerging, gets a bit of news coverage before they figure out what's actually happening, and that's about it. Some are, so far, only mentioned in passing, like the ephebophile Southern Baptist chaplain at the internment camp, and just as well, because letting him get away with anything would be in rather poor taste anywhere, and might even be illegal in a few countries. If you're not quite sure what an ephebophile is, watch Family Guy. Certain crew members get more page space than others. Sara, the young HAM from Denver who gets involved by accident, is more important than she originally was.

I've been thinking about how long I've been working on this book, and it's a very long time indeed. The basic idea dates back to the mid 1970s. Back then, I created the entire Gehunite civilization, originally as a swords and sorcery milieu, but later developing into a technological culture and finally a space-faring one. It just never quite hung together.

Then the modern GOP came along, with their penchant for lying about everything that might negatively affect their masters' profits, and their thralldom to modern commercial religion. Frequent calls for a "convention of the states," ostensibly to propose anti-abortion and anti-gay amendments, but obviously capable of simply throwing out the entire Constitution and starting over, suggested someone might just manage to pull this off, and sooner rather than later. Donald Trump's early-term enchantment with ruling by decree, rather than going through Congress, figures in as well, though obviously no current politicians are mentioned by name. The Returning 2019 new Constitution, after all, gives the President that power, though it does curiously make it effective only after 2025.

Just in case the incumbent gets reelected, you know. 

In any case, a theocratic, totalitarian United States, where getting an abortion or being homosexual could get you executed, provided a nice villain. Making the President a fifth-generation evangelist, and one who recognized, at least inwardly, that he was really just a remarkably successful con man in a long line of successful con men, adds something as well. We try to be realistic. Or as realistic as possible, given the speculative nature of the novel.

In any case, I can certainly use your support. So drop in at my campaign. Look around, see if any of the perks appeal to you. Contribute for one of the perks, or just make a donation. If nothing else, you'll get your name in the book and on my website.

The Joys of Self Production

I didn't set out to self produce my own play. At least, not one I wrote. My original self production idea was limited to acting. I'd had a good time doing Don Nigro's Ravenscroft at The Little Theatre Off Broadway in Grove City, Ohio, and wanted to explore the John Ruffing character a bit more.

The program I put together would have included six of Nigro's short plays, five monologues, Creatures Lurking in the Churchyard, Lagoon, Just Out the Corner of Her Eye, Broadway Macabre, and Mermaid, and a one act play, The Rooky Wood. I'd get to play Ruffing in Creatures Lurking in the Churchyard, The Rooky Wood, and Mermaid, aging from 36 to 75 over the course of the combined show. The other three monologues would provide solo showcases for the other two Rooky Wood cast members and one other actress. They would also give me time to redo my makeup, and by placing Just Out the Corner of Her Eye between Lagoon and The Rooky Wood, give the actress who would play Meridith in Lagoon time to change into her Edwardian costume for The Rooky Wood. Everyone would get a chance to show off a little.

The problem was that Samuel French had issued these six little plays as parts of three different collections. Nigro was willing to have them all lumped together and licensed as if the six were a single work. That makes perfect sense, considering the combined running time was barely two hours. He also suggested the name "Creatures" as a collective title, which is how my production company ended up as the Creatures Plays Corporation.

The title was the only part Samuel French would go along with. The author had approved titling the show that way, and it was obvious that the usual practice of printing the title of each play on a separate line, with the author's name on the next line, would make for a rather clunky looking program cover or poster, so they were fine with that contract modification. But they wouldn't go along with the collective pricing idea. There were three collections involved, and each would have to be licensed separately.

This was getting expensive. I wanted to do a collection of monologues, which put together still amounted to a straight play, but I was looking at the sort of royalties you'd pay for a musical.

We're all familiar with the warning printed in every published script: don't rent a theater before you have a signed contract for the rights to the play. Good advice, and I had followed it. But I had reserved a theater. That's something you generally do need to do before securing the rights, because you need to know the performance dates to get the license. A community theater that owns its own building knows when it will be available. If you're renting a commercial space, you have to reserve it. The show would be presented at The Abbey Theater of Dublin (Ohio), and it was busy enough that I needed to reserve several months in advance in order to get three consecutive weekends.

I could still cancel when I'd reached the point where I knew I wasn't going to be able to do what I'd originally wanted. I'd have been out the $200 deposit, but that would be all.

Did I want to do that? It was obvious the original plan wasn't going to work. The royalties would just be too high, and I couldn't exactly guarantee I'd attract enough of an audience to get the money back. 

So I started reading other plays. Lots of other plays. But none of them seemed to have a really good part for someone my age. There are more parts for older actors than older actresses, but there really aren't that many good parts for either. 

 I started wondering if I should just write something myself. I had time. Probably two or three months before I'd either have to start casting and rehearsing or just drop the whole thing, so I sat down and started writing.

In a remarkably short time I'd produced the first version of Coming Out. I sent this to several friends, and a few interested strangers, for comments and suggestions. It turned out that no one was what you'd call wildly enthusiastic about it. After re-reading it a few times, even I wasn't that enthusiatic about it. The gist seemed to be, "You've got a show here, but I really don't like any of these people." 

The original plot was something like this. Dad is a Baptist minister on the day of his retirement. Now that he's retired, he can stop pretending and admit that he stopped believing in God ten years ago, and that much of what he's been preaching for that time was just what he figured the congregation wanted to hear. He kept preaching while he built up his retirement account, not because he believed it. His oldest son, also a minister, does believe this stuff. When his younger son shows up with his roommate, and tells everyone they're moving to New York to get married, the older son explodes, Dad spends a lot of time apologizing for all the homophobic sermons, and there's a lot of yelling. Then it turns out Dad slipped up one day and got the church secretary knocked up. Meanwhile, the oldest son turns out to be a wife beater, and he probably got his infant son killed by attempting faith healing instead of just calling a doctor. The secretary doesn't want to cause problems, but Mom figured it out anyway. 

A big issue here is obviously that Dad has been pulling a con on his congregation for the last ten years, which doesn't make him particularly likable. He's hardly alone in this. A surprising number of ministers are secretly atheists. But people still disliked him. The only one they liked was George, the gay son, perhaps because he was the only one they could really root for. All in all, it was a very serious play.

It was obvious some changes had to be made.

Bob, the father, got a new job. Instead of a Baptist minister he became a philosophy professor. He was still an atheist, but now it fit in nicely with his profession. He also became British. Susan, the mother, was promoted from housewife to English Literature professor. Susan's parents were dead now, but Bob's father was still living at 97, and while he never appeared on stage, dialogue established that he had been a theoretical physics professor, was also an atheist, and sixth in a line of barons dating back to the time of George III. Bob was a younger son, so he'd never have inherited the title even if he hadn't been naturalized as an American in 1982. Having him a resident of the United States for the last 38 years also provided a pretty good excuse if the accent wasn't always absolutely correct, and contributed to the humor by Bob's conscious preference for "racy" British slang when he could just as easily use an Americanism that would pass muster.

Instead of Bob's retirement, the family is gathering to celebrate the parents' 40th wedding anniversary. They also come on in pairs, rather than everyone being on stage from the start, which gives Bob and Susan some time alone. This gives the audience a chance to learn a little more about them before the problems start, including establishing that they have a more-or-less "open" marriage, and a running joke that Bob "dresses like Doctor  Who." (Actually, he dresses like me, and like Bob, I was wearing tweeds and bow ties long before Matt Smith got the part.) Instead of the heavy drama of the original version, the play had evolved into a dark comedy.

James, the eldest son, remained a preacher, with a 6,000 family church in Texas, and a daily television ministry. James' wife, Karen, started as his contemporary in age, but eventually became quite a bit younger, 26 to James' 37. That was prompted by cast availability, but it turned out to work better. It meant they'd been married a much shorter time, and by having Karen come from an abusive foster home, it also went some way to explaining why she put up with James. The physical abuse, and the faith healing death of their son, remained from the original version. So did the homophobic mania upon learning that his younger brother was gay (something that everyone else in the family had obviously figured out years ago). There are, to be sure, some indications that James may not be as unalterably heterosexual as he'd like to believe, either, but he's a Bible literalist and any such thoughts have to be stomped into the ground and utterly suppressed.

His father thinks that if George wants to marry Eric he should go right ahead and do so, but Bob is an atheist, so he isn't worried about spending an eternity he doesn't believe will exist being tortured in a place he's equally sure is imaginary. James, so far as Bob can tell, is just a well-meaning, but very annoying fanatic. He wouldn't want him running things, but he doesn't initially consider him personally dangerous. He'll learn.

The pregnant secretary was also retained, but now there was an actual affair, not a one-time weakness. Susan was also a bit quicker to see what had happened. This revelation upsets the children a lot more than it bothers Bob and Susan. After all, we'd established fairly early that both of them fooled around when the chance presented itself, and the affairs didn't seem to diminish the obvious love between them. Susan gets a little angry, but mostly she just drinks more and gives Carol a hard time. After finding out that her mother has had as many affairs as her father, Ellen briefly wonders if they're all Bob's children, and Susan states with absolute certainty that they are. James, of course, rants about everyone going to hell, what with being horrible sodomites, adulterers, and fornicators. James being James, he's also completely bewildered when his battered wife decides she's had enough and announces she's going to divorce him. At the end Bob, Susan, and Carol all find out some secrets about each other, and ultimately we're left with Bob and Susan wondering how they're going to explain the solution they've come up with to the two children who are still there (James stormed off after his father called him a "self righteous, obnoxious, unimaginative little fundamentalist prick"), and decide the best answer is probably that Susan will have another drink and Bob will have "the whole bloody bottle."

So, with some re-writing, I had a much better play. Now it was time to cast it.

I knew I was going to be on stage most of the time, so I made sure I had an associate director who would be able to keep everyone, including me, in line. 

Announcements were made, and we put together a cast. Ashley Collins was the first cast, as daughter Ellen, and I was glad to get her. She'd played Dolly, the maid, in Ravenscroft, so if nothing else I knew she'd remember her lines and deliver them with perfect timing. Jim LeVally signed on to play James without even reading the script, and I was damned glad to get him, too. Bob and Susan are technically the leads, but James and Karen are the real stand out parts. Over the next week or so we filled all the roles.

Then the fun began. The actor who was going to play Ellen's husband got sick and had to drop out after only a couple rehearsals. Then the actress who was going to play Susan found herself faced with potential conflicts that might, or might not, have her leaving the country during the run. There was no way of knowing, so she was out too. My first choice for Karen had her work schedule changed, so she was out as well. There was a similar problem with the actress playing the secretary, Carol. (Hint for directors: Be wary of casting nannies in your shows, their working schedules are sometimes unpredictable.) And, just to make things perfect, the actor who was going to play George, the gay son, also ended up unable to do it because of his changed work schedule. This sort of thing isn't usually a problem with a professional show, obviously, but easily can be when people aren't getting paid. Making a living takes precedence.

So there I was, a couple weeks into rehearsals, and I'm down to Bob (me), James, Ellen, and George's boyfriend Eric (Will Smith), with Susan, Karen, George, Mark, and Carol now needing to be recast. Just for fun, the associate director also bailed about this time. 

So I had to find a lot of new people. Ashley suggested Jai Furlong for George, and when we got him in to read he was perfect. Brenda Newsom came in as Susan, and Martha Kathryn Smith agreed to do Karen (two more Ravenscroft veterans, Brenda had played the housekeeper, Mrs French and Martha had been the governess and prime murder suspect, Marcy). This was when Karen's age dropped from 37 to 26, which was still a good bit older than Martha, but within the range she could play convincingly. Then Grace Rinehart came in as Carol. We went quite a while before finding a new Mark, and at one point I seriously considered just writing him out of the show (the published script includes alternate lines for that eventuality). He didn't say very much anyway. Eventually we found Chris Wharton for that part, and Ashley could stop carrying around a throw pillow that she could place on the couch to indicate where he should be sitting during rehearsals.

I'd allowed a longer than normal rehearsal period, just in case I needed to make script changes, and it came in handy during the cast shuffling. In the middle of all this Colleen Dunne came aboard as director, after she noticed a Facebook post mentioning the available job. By this time I'd come to the conclusion that I'd just as soon not do any of the directing if I was going to be acting in this thing, so she became the sole director. Colleen was young, and had only assistant directed to that point, but she'd been acting since she was a child and it was instantly obvious she'd been paying attention. She got people moving around more, and suggested some cuts and other changes that definitely improved the show. The woman belongs on Broadway, and take your pick as to acting or directing, because she's brilliant at both.

I suppose this brings up a popular current topic on some other blogs. Is it legitimate for directors to make changes to plays? Colleen suggested some, and mostly they were made. But here's the thing. There's a huge difference between a director suggesting changes to a play that's never been done before, and directors arbitrarily making changes to something that's already been published. When Colleen suggested changes, she was suggesting them to the author, and I could approve or disapprove of them. Most of the time I agreed with her. She rarely suggested specific line changes, by the way. It was more along the lines of, "You might want to think about shortening this scene, because it's dragging a little." One ten minute, two-character scene was cut nearly in half by that suggestion, and it worked better after it was cut, even if I did lose a good bit of a favorite rant. Bob was supposed to be a college professor, but sometimes he tended to talk a little too much like one. All of those changes made it into the published script, along with a few ad libs from the actors when I thought they worked better than what I'd originally written. One that didn't was changing one word that the actor had trouble pronouncing for another that came out easier, but that was an accommodation to a particular actor and the next may not have a problem with the word.

Now, while we were rehearsing, we were also trying to raise some additional money. I had enough to produce the show on my own, but I still wanted to take Max Bialystock's advice about never putting your own money into a show. An Indiegogo campaign was set up, and promptly went nowhere. A website was set up for the show, at www.ComingOutThePlay.com, and it was, and is, a rather nice site, but didn't get much traffic. (I also own ComingOutMovie.com, just in case.) One reason for trying to raise a good deal of extra cash was that I wanted a DVD of the production, and to get the quality I  really wanted, which involved having a professional crew with three cameras shoot the preview, I was looking at somewhere in the area of $10,000. That didn't include actually making the DVDs, which would have been another couple grand. 

In some ways we got away pretty cheap. The management at my apartment complex let us use the community room to rehearse, so that was one major expense eliminated. The theater, obviously, we had to pay for, but they found us all the furniture we needed in their stock, so we didn't have to buy or rent that. If we'd wanted to build a set they also had flats we could use. As it happened, we just used the furniture to define the playing area, playing against black drapery backdrops. The closest we came to building a set was a free standing railing for a few scenes set on the front porch. The Abbey Theater is a black box, but all the seats are in front of the stage. From the stage, it looks a lot like a television studio. The biggest effect of this was that, without a proscenium, most of the entrances were made from the audience left auditorium entrance.

There was also a little issue with publicity. I didn't have a huge advertising budget to work with, particularly since the Indiegogo campaign never really took off. There are always lots of community bulletin boards you can post to, but you have to wonder how many people really read them. The biggest expenditure was running an ad in the Columbus Dispatch for four weeks.

What we really wanted was to get an article in the theater section, but that never happened. It seems that thirty year old musicals are more interesting than new plays. Especially if the musical is the fourth local production in the last three months. I did get a note saying the photo captions weren't formatted correctly, and this is how they should be done. Apparently I was supposed to be familiar with the local style guide, because the captions as originally provided would have been fine with most papers.

We opened on October 4, 2013, after a preview the night before. I learned a few things over the next three weekends. The most obvious was that we really needed that newspaper article, or review, or whatever. It certainly didn't seem like anyone was reading the ads, which weren't huge, but were certainly big enough to be noticed. Apparently no one did, though, because of the nine performances the only one that got enough people into the audience to cover expenses was the last one. We might have done some business if we could have run a couple more weeks, but the theater wasn't going to be available, and I wasn't really willing to risk the money. Whether any of the actors would have stuck around is also an open question.

Another issue proved to be the theater's location. The Abbey Theater is located in the Dublin Recreation Center, and has an address on Post Road. Some years back, Post Road had been eliminated where it ran through Coffman Park, leaving a stub that included the entrance to the Recreation Center. About a week before we opened, that stub was closed for road work. You could still get to the Rec Center by coming through the park, but it wasn't as obvious, and no GPS would ever lead you in that way unless you were already at the park entrance. Friends of mine from Cleveland said they'd spent about 45 minutes driving around, completely lost, until they finally stopped at the Police Station and got directions. I can't help wondering how many people who'd decided to come see the show as walk ins just gave up and went home. There were detour signs, but they said "Rec Center," and I have to presume that not everyone knew that's where the theater was located.

According to my records, I lost about $8,000 on the show. In the long run, that's probably not important. It's a good show, and there will be other productions, so I should make that up on royalties eventually. We never managed the pro-shot DVD, but we did record the show, so the cast at least has their copies. The sound isn't very good, and it's frequently far too grainy, particularly in the close-ups, as all the camera movement was added in post production. It isn't anything I could sell. You can watch it on YouTube, though, at least for now. As I said, the video is frequently grainy and the sound is pretty bad, but it might be good enough to tell you if you want to produce it on your own stage. It also suffers from the tiny audiences who managed to find the theater, so there are a lot of  places where a larger audience would likely be laughing that don't get much of reaction on the video. 

The show was nominated for Best Original Play in the 2013 BroadwayWorld.com Columbus Awards (and not by me, or I'd have nominated myself for playwright while I was at it). As the nominees consisted of two plays and a musical, I can't say I was too surprised when the musical won. There's a good reason straight plays and musicals don't normally compete against each other. Coming Out was fairly firmly in second when the voting ended, at least. I'll settle for that. 

Would I do it again? I suppose I would, but only if I could be sure I wasn't using my own money. Bialystock was right about that one. 

 

So What Was He Really Thinking?

This is one of those actorly questions. You're playing a character, and he says something, and you find yourself curious about motivation. Is this a simple, direct statement? Is this an effort to hide something? Is this a way of saying one thing and meaning something else? Is this one of those instances when the punctuation is in the wrong place?

The great American tragedian Edwin Booth, who specialized in a somewhat overblown version of Shakespeare popular in the mid-19th century, is said to have argued that Hamlet wasn't at all suicidal, and that the emphasis in Hamlet's Act III soliloquy, "To be or not to be," was generally misplaced. Booth reportedly argued that what was "to be or not to be" wasn't the continued existence of Hamlet, but the ghost-inspired plan to kill his uncle. As usually phrased, Hamlet would ask, "whether 'tis nobler in the mind, to suffer the slings and arrows, etc.," while Booth reportedly preferred to phrase it, "whether 'tis nobler, in the mind to suffer, etc." That is, whether it would be better to suffer the mental consequences of inaction, or to just go ahead and kill Claudius. To Booth, Hamlet wasn't considering whether to kill himself, but whether to believe the ghost and kill his uncle, while also considering the eternal consequences of that action if it turned out the ghost wasn't his father, but the Devil masquerading as his father to entice him into committing a mortal sin.

Shakespeare, of course, was rather notorious for playing to the groundlings, and not above throwing in some fairly crude jokes and puns. For example, Malvolio, in Twelfth Night, reading what he believes to be Olivia's letter, notes, "These be her very 'C's, her 'U's, and her 'T's, and it is thus she makes her great 'P's." This one isn't too hard to figure out even now, and it was even more obvious in Elizabethan times, when the word "and" was frequently elided so that it sounded very similar to the letter 'N.'

Then there was Hamlet and Ophelia's lap, and just where, exactly, do you put the accent in "country" when he asks, "Did'st think I meant country matters?" If you wanted to make sure the groundlings got the joke--a leavening of humor probably being fairly useful in a four-hour play--it didn't hurt to make sure the second syllable had only two letters.

Shakespeare gets away with some things in America simply because slang expressions don't always travel very well. A classic non-Shakespearean example reminds us that, if you must deal with someone who's pissed, it's generally better to deal with a pissed Englishman than a pissed American. The Brit is merely inebriated, and may actually be quite pleasant in that condition; the American is more than likely looking for a fight. Shaw was certainly right about the common language.

Being a little less vulgar (well, I did just get done playing someone that some of the other characters more than once described as a vulgar man) the question of motivation, and of hidden meaning, remains.

I am far from what anyone is ever likely to describe as a Method actor. Sure, I'll argue a little if a director wants me to do something that doesn't seem to make any sense, but mostly I tend to figure he/she has a good reason for wanting a scene played in a particular way. But I'm more a "sad looks something like this" sort of actor, and not a "remember what it felt like when you had to put down the cat" sort of actor. I did play a serial killer once, albiet a fairly funny one, and I never felt there was any need to go out and kill a bunch of people to get the motivation down. I have no idea what it feels like to kill someone as, so far as I know, I've never done it. 

As far as I know. Like my father, I've shot in the direction of the enemy, but I really have no way of knowing if I actually hit anyone. Just as happy not to know, really.

I also have no idea what it feels like to be dead, though I presume it feels about like not being born yet. That is, it probably doesn't feel like anything, because you're dead and if you're dead there's no "you" there to think about it. That's also an excellent reason not to worry about dying. The one thing in life you'll never know is that you've died.

It is, admittedly, just about impossible to imagine what it would be like to simply not exist. We have no experience of it, or at least no experience we can remember. Our brains insist on visualizing everything shutting off, like Arnold's cybernetic brain flickering out as it melts down in the molten steel, and yet somehow thereafter being conscious that we're no longer conscious. As we are conscious beings, it's really hard to imagine total non-existence, though the obvious benefit of that sort of future is that we'll be utterly unaware of it when it happens.

Well, that's mostly philosophy anyway, and really has nothing to do with acting unless you're going to be playing a corpse. If you are, the obvious thing to remember is that it's a lot easier in a movie than it is on stage. In the movie they can just repeat a single frame, which makes remaining motionless fairly easy. Or stick your head up through a hole at the top of a fake body. The only way to remain completely motionless on stage is to actually die, which is generally not recommended, and makes it rather difficult to handle the curtain calls.

Charlton Heston said he once had a problem with that during a performance of A Man For All Seasons when the stage lights didn't go completely out as he was about to have his head chopped off. He related that they opted for practicality over realism.

Most people would, except possibly some ancient Romans, but they'd have used criminals as stand-ins when it came time to slaughter the leading man.They wouldn't have looked upon it as particularly cruel, mind you. They'd have just thought of it as a creative method of execution.

Live theater audiences are generally willing to tolerate a little movement. I was obviously breathing while sprawled out on the rug in Ravenscroft, and the audience could certainly tell that, but they were also willing to accept the convention that the poor Inspector was breathing so shallowly that the women thought he was dead. Honestly, I didn't mind getting hit over the head with that vase. That brief interval was the longest time in the play that I didn't have to say anything. The man has about 200 more lines than Hamlet, and is actively involved in every scene. The bad part was having the glass of water dumped on my head to wake me up.

Not only was that a bit unpleasant as a general experience, it also meant my hair was going to be a bit messed up for the rest of the play. Sure, our Marcy did her best to smooth it out while she was drying it with the towel, but a towel isn't a comb and, honestly, I suspect she was more concerned with getting my head dry to avoid water stains on her skirt than with how I looked at the curtain call.

Looking a bit mussed for the rest of the play didn't matter. I'd just got hit over the head with a vase and had a glass of water dumped on my head.

Going "Into the Woods"

For our merry little band, Into the Woods is over. The curtain has come down -- well, closed -- for the final time, everything has been packed up and it's all over until something else comes along. That curtain closing instead of coming down was one thing I really didn't like about the production. If your position at the end of Act I is all the way at stage left, about eight feet in front of the curtain, when the lights go out you've got plenty of time to get back behind the curtain if it's coming down, but you end up doing a bit of running when it's trying to outrace you to center stage.

Now this was not the best moment for the Narrator, with the rest of the characters closing in. At this point the stage business would have been me nervously leafing through the "story book" and concluding that whatever was happening didn't seem to be in the story. That was immediately followed by the line, "Sorry, I tell the story, I'm not part of it."

Well, you can see how well that was working out. Little Redridinghood was always waving that big knife around, and you really couldn't trust that Steward and his staff, either (just ask Jack's Mother). Still, the Narrator (me) did manage to talk the others out of throwing him to the Giant in the hopes she'd mistake him for Jack and go back up the beanstalk and leave them alone. Not that it did much good. The Witch just took over, yelled, "Here's the Lad," and threw me to the Giant anyway. The Giant claimed she wasn't dumb, but when you're 266 feet tall*, nearsighted, and you've picked up a poor human to get a closer look, you can't be too smart if you think the best thing to do next is drop him.

On the bright side, that offstage thud did mean I got to relax until the second act Finale. We had a different actor playing the Mysterious Man (the part is usually doubled by the Narrator). I almost managed to stay out of the Finale, but I made the mistake of being visible to the choreographer at a rehearsal where several actors were already missing, so she stuck me into it. Obviously, if the Narrator and Mysterious Man were played by the same actor (Tom Aldredge in the original production), and the Mysterious Man was in the Finale, it stood to reason that Sondheim and Lapine didn't intend the Narrator to be in it. The current Central Park production has also split up the part, with Chip Zien (the original Baker) playing the Mysterious Man (which means the original Baker is now playing his own father), and the Narrator played by a boy. The last part seems a little odd to me, and from some online comments apparently it seems a little odd to a lot of others as well.

In any event, I never managed to convince the director and choreographer that the Finale would have been better without me in it, though I still suspect I may have convinced any audience members who were watching me at the end of the play that I was correct when I suggested I wasn't a dancer. Actors always say "I can move," but, really, as often as not that just means they can get from one side of the stage to the other without tripping over their own feet. Back in the day, I mostly got by on my singing, which used to be very nearly Met quality, and still generally sounds better than average, even if the range is more limited.

If someone wants to make me happy they can offer me Emile in South Pacific, or maybe Cervantes/Don Quixote in Man of La Mancha.

*Height based on her feet being 40' long.

Photos © 2012, Keith Gergel. Used by permission.

How do you Kill a Brainless Zombie?

This came up the other day during a rehearsal break. How do you kill a zombie? You take a shotgun and blow its brains out. What happens if you're attacked by a zombie? You become a zombie. What's the first thing a zombie does when it kills a victim? It eats the victim's brain.

So maybe the first zombie had a brain, but the new victim-zombie is brainless, because the first zombie ate it. Yet the new zombie is still staggering around, trying to kill more humans and eat their brains. You're developing generations of victim zombies here who have no brains to blow out. So how do you kill them?

Or do you only turn into a zombie if the first zombie gets distracted and doesn't eat your brain after all? Maybe the fully brain-eaten get to stay dead? Oh, the possibilities!

Okay, if the prelude to a zombie outbreak is a naked Linnea Quigley dancing in a cemetery, you might not bother with a detailed plot analysis. In fact, when it comes to horror movies in general, you probably don't want to worry too much about plausibility, whether it contains a naked Linnea or not.

For instance, does anyone think a nebbish like Seymour was really able to breed that plant? Or that anyone who looked like Jackie Joseph would want to date him, even if he did? And should we speculate as to whether Dick Miller's peculiar diet in the same film was a sly pun on Jean Kerr's 1957 book? 

Do not over-analyse 'B' movies. 

But still, just how do you kill a brainless zombie? The world needs to know these things, just in case.

Proof of Human-Dinosaur Contemporaneity

At Gen 6:4 it is stated, "There were giants in the earth in those day." What were these giants? It seems unlikely they were men, because all illustrated editions of Grimm show that giants are extremely large, something like 30 or 40 feet tall. Such heights are simply impossible in normal human beings, except when exposed to certain forms of radiation (see such documentary films as The Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, or The Amazing Colossal Man), or through the use of magic (Grimm, Harry Potter). Actual humans can't grow much taller than about eight feet and still support their own weight.

It follows, therefore, that these biblical giants can only have been dinosaurs. This follows from the most important precept of biblical interpretation, Scribere aliquid, ergo verum est (Someone wrote it, therefore it's true). We do, it must be noted, also have additional evidence.

Dinosaurs were contemporary with man at least into the 20th century. In 1914, Winsor McCay, undeniably a human being, was preserved on film riding on a large sauropod dinosaur apparently named Gertie. There was also the well known documentary, The Valley of Gwangi, in which several reasonably well known actors may be seen interacting with various dinosaurs. The important thing here is that these were wild dinosaurs, including a rare specimen of Tyranosaurus harryhousenus, unlike those in Jurassic Park, which were specially bred from ancient DNA fragments.

Now it hardly needs mentioning that many hold dinosaurs to long predate human beings. This is in opposition to biblical chronology, which clearly establishes that the earth was created slightly less than 6,000 years ago. Some will naturally argue that the earth itself is somewhere between 3.5 to 4.5 billion years old, but why should we be swayed by this? It is perfectly reasonable to say that a 6,000 year old earth is composed of 4 billion year old material. No one can reasonably argue with the date of creation (1 Tishri, 1, or 5772 years ago Sept 28, 2011), as this is calculable from biblical genealogy tables (though Jewish authorities have discovered that Bishop Ussher miscalculated slightly). This date having been positively established by tradition, which all human beings recognize as superior to such questionable concepts as inductive reasoning, nuclear decay, and critical thinking (the latter defined by Christian authorities as "the process by which children are indoctrinated by evil educators to ignore inerrant biblical pronouncements in favor of contradictory propaganda supported only by evidence"), we can hardly produce any data in opposition.

This seeming discrepancy is, in any case, easily explained. The earth was created at a much later date than it was created. This can perhaps best be understood by referring to a long running series of BBC documentaries, which conclusively established that a container with an exterior footprint no greater than about 25 square feet is able to contain a portable dwelling consisting of several hundred rooms, including an Olympic size swimming pool. As this dimensionally ambiguous device is also able to travel in non-linear space-time, it naturally follows that the material of which a universe is composed may be older than the universe itself, or any planet contained therein.

This comes from another established biblical precept, which is, Testatus Deus, credo, si discordes interficiam te (God declared, I believe, if you disagree I'll kill you). This has worked extremely well for the religious for nearly 2,000 years, though for the last century or two being somewhat tempered by the interference of secular governments. Also noted is the principle, Seperatum quod probat (That which is unconnected proves it).

So we can see, upon consideration, that space-time itself, being non linear and essentially wadded up like a ball of string, whereby one may, at any time, move from one location on that string to another (Beckettian String Theory) dinosaurs and man are logically able to coexist.

Further documentary proof may be found in the collected works of Johnny Hart and V.T. Hamlin, which may be found cited in a large number of newspapers to this day. For those less inclined to mere reading, documentary producers Hanna and Barbera have contributed several decades of programs showing human-dinosaur interaction, including proving that dinosaurs were at one time used not only as companion animals, but as household appliances. H & B are also prominent in the documentation of animal language, and ursine culinary kleptomania.

Finally, the clincher, certain religious groups have built museums documenting not only human-dinosaur coexistence, but such phenomena as animal distribution by means of a large boat, with numerous supporting dioramas, along with a very clear explanation of why the failures of a single pair of apocryphal human beings require the wholesale, perpetual roasting of all human beings who fail to recognize the necessity of human sacrifice at the beginning of the common era. The eternal torture is for your own good, because the creator deity loves you, and expresses that love by torturing you for failing to respond to that love with a complete and willing suspension of disbelief. So, because we all know Exhibet nunquam mentiri (exhibits never lie), it is therefore proved that dinosaurs and humans lived together.