Tablesaw!

I don't have time to write fully about last weekend, because I still need to catch up on sleep from the same busy weekend. We saw seven different friends groups, a comedy show, a wedding, a historic building, and rain. All told, we drove around 700 miles down and up the Pacific Coast.

I'd particularly like to write about the show, House of Gains. We've been seeing some very high-quality improv recently, and I'd like to do better at pinning that butterfly after the fact.

One small joy was that we managed to transport the pink-champagne cupcakes all the way from SLO to Los Angeles. The frosting typically doesn't travel well outside of refrigeration, but we used a system of cold packs around inverted quart-sized mason jars to make the trip. (We put a cupcake on the lid, then screwed the jar on top of it, giving the frosting and pink chocolate shaving protection for the entire car ride.) Luckily we only had to move three this way, though we might try more in the future.

I also managed to give a Christmas gift I neglected to ship last year: The first issue of a Cenobium, a Hellraiser zine from the 80s(?) which I found unexpectedly in the used section of a comic book store. (See, writing more blog posts probably would have encouraged me to do more research about it while I still had it in my possession, because I can't find much about it now.)

This has been a week for musicals. On Sunday, I saw Reanimator: The Musical. I missed this in its initial run last year, but I am so glad I saw it now as it prepares for a tour to the New York Musical Theatre Festival and the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. If you have the opportunity to see it in any of those places, you absolutely should. The staging is uniformly excellent, with Grand Guignol effects as horrific and cheesy one would expect. But I was constantly surprised by the show. The music was better than I expected, in writing and performance. I also didn't realize that the show was created by the same creative team responsible for the Reanimator movie. But mostly, I never thought I would get to see George Wendt as a lobotomized zombie slave on a small stage. That was pretty awesome.

Though it's generally comedic, there are only a few cheap jokes, which makes them stand out all the more. When a large bunch of zombies make their entrance, they do the Thriller dance, of course. And while most songs are original, one is a knock-off version of "My Way." But on the whole, it's an excellent show.

Tonight, I went to the last show of the East West Players' season, A Little Night Music. Though the text remained the same, the production took its design cues from 1910 Shanghai. I've never seen this musical in its entirety, and I really enjoyed it. I also recommend it, though sadly, unlike Reanimator, it does not have a Splash Zone in the audience.

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The 9:00 a.m. alarm continues to be a good schedule making me more productive in terms of job search and general doing of things. I've gotten in touch with a staffing agency, and tomorrow I'll be doing a phone interview with a company that is looking to hire a legal word processor for four or five months. If that goes through, it will be a surprise. I was just getting used to the idea of having lots of free time. (I've only learned to cook one new thing!) Still, it'll give me a chance to keep the cash flow going while looking for something more steady.

On Sunday, at the season opener of Dungeonmaster, I saw aimegame before the show, among others. When I asked what she'd been doing, she said, "Racing go-karts!" and invited me to join her and some friends on the track on Monday. I'd been feeling a little under-socialized, so last night I headed out to Torrance to race.

It was my first time in a go-kart, but I acquitted myself well. aimegame had yelled that the only thing I had to do was "GO FAST," and I took it to heart, barreling into turns and sliding all over the damn place. It turns out that my previous experience with drifting in Mario Kart was incorrect: in fact, sliding around curves makes you go slower, rather than giving you a burst of glowing speed. On the other hand, skidding around a corner takes less time than crashing into the corner, and my drifiting kept me from a race-stopping collision with the barriers several times. Though I was in the basement among eight racers in my first match, the second, when it was just the three of us, I managed to eke out second place over aimegame.

What I didn't expect was the toll it would take on my arms. I know I don't have the greatest upper body strength, but after the races, my arms were trembling, and it hurt to lift things, which was a bit much, even for me. It certainly didn't feel like I was overstressing myself while I was racing, but there was a decent amount of adrenaline. Whether the steering actually did require more work than I'd realize, or the rush of speed had simply caused me to grip the wheel too tightly for too long, my arms were wrecked. Between that and some bumping around in the cart that left my back and sides a bit sore, I've been feeling the kart all day.

I'm probably going to join them again, but I might need to work more on my push-ups before then.

The conversation continuing in the comments to my last post is awesome. Something occurred to me that didn't fit in with any of the comments, so I thought I'd address it separately.

A large part of my history with literary criticism in general, and the New Critics in particular, is the fact that my first serious analysis of literature came when I was a theatre major. In particular, my professor Stacy Wolf was very adamant about debunking the idea that analyzing theatre meant analyzing a playscript written by a playwright, as opposed to a produced play with actors, set design, costumes, music, and anything else that might be there, including the fact that any particular production of a play will have several slightly variant performances. It's harder, but it's so much more awesome.

It was also the first time that anyone had ever seriously suggested that the cover actually does affect the book. That is, it was an article that analyzed the effect of publicity on the production, arguing that it could never be simply ignored in the analysis of a play, production, or performance.

It included an anecdote about the premiere of Waiting for Godot in America that really stuck with me. Unfortunately, I had a hard time verifying it, and so for many years, I worried that it was too good to be true. And then, just today, I have found that it has appeared in the New Yorker, from an eyewitness:

amuel Beckett’s "Waiting for Godot," billed as "the laugh sensation of two continents," made its American début at the Coconut Grove Playhouse, in Miami, Florida, in 1956. My father, Bert Lahr, was playing Estragon, one of the two bowler-hatted tramps who pass the time in a lunar landscape as they wait in vain for the arrival of a Mr. Godot. "Playing 'Waiting for Godot' in Miami was like doing 'Giselle' in Roseland," my father said. The play was not so much a laugh riot as a revolution in theatrical storytelling; inevitably, it was met with militant incomprehension. "A dramatic whatzit," Walter Winchell called it, adding, "The history of frammis never had anything so rillerrah." On opening night, half the audience walked out after the first act; the next day, there was a line at the box office—to return tickets.

—John Lahr, "Panic Attack"

Of course, once found, that phrase "the Laugh Sensation of two Continents" becomes a key into finding related work, because the anecdote is so good, it gets worked into other articles. I'm pretty sure the article I read was excerpted from Directing Postmodern Theater: Shaping Signification in Performance. And here's an excerpt from The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative using it to talk about paratexts, which flourish mentioned in comments:

Gerard Genette invented the word paratexts for this material that lies somehow on the threshold of the narrative. Talking about the impact of a narrative, we can easily overlook the contributions of paratexts. We get into the habit of assuming that the narrative is wholly comprised in the thing we read, hear, or see with its beginning, middle, and end. Of course, the influence of some paratexts, like the kind of paper a novel is printed on, or the texture of its binding, may have very little influence on how we experience a narrative. (Though even here one can find exceptions. Wilde's Dorian Gray purchased "nine large-paper copies" of his favorite novel "and had them bound in different colours so that they might suit his various moods.") But a strong recommendation on the book jacket might predispose us to read a narrative with a favorable mindset or, conversely, to be doubly disappointed when the narrative dails to match the expectations created by the blurb. Or an ad, perhaps for commercial reasons, may lead us to expect one kind of play or film, when the work is quite something else. The American premier of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot—a stark, static, darkly humored representation of the human condition—was advertised as "the laugh sensation of two continents." As a result, the production played to, if not the wrong audience, the wrong set of expectations. On opening night, the upper-middle-class Miami audience, lured by the prospect of light comedy, left the theatre in droves before the first act.

The other day, I got an e-mail from my friend at Wolfram & Hart that read

It's Not Monty Python.

I have two extra tickets for tomorrow. You and ojouchan are going. End of discussion.

It took a little while to figure out what she was talking about, but eventually I learned that she was talking about "An Evening Without Monty Python," which is playing at the Ricardo Montalbán Theatre around the corner from us.

Ojou was lukewarm about the event, "It's not actually Monty Python. It's just some nobodies doing Monty Python skits." My ardor was dampened as well, until I checked the website and asked her, "Hey, did you know that Wash is in it?" To which she replied, "Wwwwhaaaaaaaat?"

So yes, the show is Monty Python sketches performed by people who aren't Monty Python, but it is direct by Eric Idle and performed by some people you may know, like Alan Tudyk, Jane Leeves (Daphne from Frasier), and other people who don't have name recognition, but do have a HITG! factor. And we headed down the block to the Montalbán to see it.

Overall, I wasn't as impressed with the show as my companions. It often felt rushed to me. It was also very often overly faithful, so that the show felt less like a reimagining (or even an homage) and more like a shallow imitation. It was a bit on and off. Some sketches, like "Argument" or "Albatross" seem to having the comedic timing written into the script, so there wasn't much room (or need) to do anything different. But then came a bit like "Nudge Nudge" where it seemed like it was just an impression of Idle's original performance. That kind of thing can fly in a dorm common room, but not on the stage.

Tudyk had some of the best moments. He took the confectioner's role in "Crunchy Frog" to hilarious, disturbing places, and was hilarious in Jones's role in "History of the Joke," which closed out the show. But probably the most memorable appearance was right at the beginning, when he was one of the Poofy Judges, in a PVC corset, purple plaid miniskirt, and fishnets.

Seriously, the man has legs.

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Afterward, we tried to scramble for a restaurant. The Velvet Margarita was full up on a Friday, but when we looked across the street, we saw a place that none of us had ever noticed before. Was it Brigadoon? Diagon Alley? Diagadoon Brill? No, it was just a brand-new fancy-pants sports bar called Capitol City. It was pretty nice; the food was much better than we'd expected (my grilled cheese was pretty bland, but the soup it was served with was nice, and everybody else had some really nice stuff), and there was less douchebaggery than we'd predicted on our walk across the street. (No guarantees about the douchebag levels remaining low as the place becomes known.)

I went home with enough booze in me to make me happy, but also to keep me tossing and turning late into the night. Thankfully, I haven't felt any ill effects (hangover or plain drowsiness) for the rest of the day.

And also, I bought a picture of Khan Noonien Singh signed by Ricardo Montalbán from Montalbán's son in law, who apparently runs the merch table. Got to find a frame for that one.

I finally have regained my car, and it's running well. I had a scare last night when the gas station attached to the garage I use refused my check card. I had to get a last-minute bailout from my parents in exchange for a check. Luckily, it appears that it was just a random malfunction, since all the money remains in my account. So, Mom, since I know you're reading this, yes, you can cash the check, I'm not in any dire financial straits that I'm hiding from you.

Moving on.

It was a long day at work, getting to know some of the firm's underutilized software. We have lots of very powerful programs that are loaded onto our computers with no explanation, so nobody knows how or when to use it. And they tend to lie dormant until the right job comes in overnight, and I start using my 1337 help-file-reading skillz to figure out what can be done. And of course, it helps when I can blast Pink Martini while I work.

Furthermore, one of my coworkers is involved with organizing "Airplane! The Reading! The Return!," [link removed 8/13/11; originally "http://www.treepeople.org/vfp.dll?OakTree~getCalendarEvents~&sd=07/23/2004&ed=07/23/2004"] a staged reading of the script of Airplane, at TreePeople Park Friday and Saturday night. It certainly sounds like fun, and if any other Angelenos are interested, let me know.

I have resigned as the stage manager of Savage in Limbo, after being verbally and physically assaulted by one of the actors in the show and after what I feel to be some horrendous decisions by the theater company's board of producers. As a result, I have a bunch more free time. Much of this will go to cleaning mi casa, but if anyone's interested in doing something, I'm more than up for it. You know, I still haven't had time to see The Return of the King . . .

It wasn't until an hour or so ago that I started to wind down from the altercation. Back at work, back in normal life, back reading a list of patent applications for typographical errors, I felt like the breath had finally been let out.

Although I've firmly and clearly extricated myself from the situation, the situation is not resolved, and my body and mind reflect it. I'm still spending the energy to stand my ground. More than that, I'm still trying to provide the cast and company with a model of strength and resolve that they seem to be fumbling for. My friend hasn't been able to sleep for two days. Another cast member has burst into tears on two separate occasions since Sunday's performance. One producer, who wasn't present on Sunday, is having to hold himself back from going to punch the Whackedor in the face. (Note the difference: this produce is able to show restraint even though he really wishes he didn't have to.)

I'm not pushing too hard, because I feel that there's too much personal bias on my part, but I'm trying to get them to do the right thing. In a normal theater setting, where the producers weren't cast members and the director wasn't in the lobby handing out programs, it would have been my call as the stage manager. In that world, the Whackedor would have gotten thrown out after five minutes, and the show would have gone on, probably with an address to the audience ambiguously explaining the last-minute change. I probably would have ended up on stage with a book in my hand.

Today, after the second production meeting where no decision was made, I brought my friend over because I was worried about her. She's been very affected by this on far more levels than I have. I love the company (and I should clarify that the Whackedor is not a member of the company, merely an actor hired to be in their show), and I'm always glad to help them out, but I have no problems walking away from a job under these circumstances. (And it is a job; Rwth and I are getting paid. It's not much, but it's more than the actors are getting, since they're mostly doing it for recognition and resume building.) For her, it's different. She's a founding member of the company, she's been handling finances for the past two years.

My friend feels she can't do the show with the Whackedor. Not only has she been deeply affected by somebody threatening someone she's known almost as family for over a decade, she's was also verbally abused by the Whackedor while she tried (somewhat inexpertly) to talk him down. She told the company that she was considering stepping down and was told that her understudy wouldn't be able to replace her. Apparently, she was horrible during understudy rehearsals, but since there was not going to be any planned night that my friend took off, they figured everything would be fine. So for the past three weeks, my friend (and I, for that matter) believed she had an understudy when, in fact, she didn't.

There's just a paralysis afflicting the group that's keeping decisions from being made. I think that many believe that the "easiest" thing to do would be for everyone (including me) to come back on Thursday and just deal for the next six performances. But that's not going to happen. It's not going to happen because I'd leave first. It's not going to happen because Rwth may leave too. It's not going to happen because my friend can't make eye contact with the Whackedor. It's not going to happen because my friends' husband who's been helping with concessions wants to get some friends and a few baseball bats and go after the Whackedor for threatening his beloved. And yet this seems "easier" than rehearsing a new understudy for anyone.

And it's Wednesday, and a final decision still hasn't been reached. These people seem to have no concept of time. It's certainly not going to be easy to rehearse an understudy if you don't make a decision until less than twenty-four hours till the next show.

I'd just like them to start acting like producers, realize that there's nobody who'll make this decision for them, and tell everyone what they're going to do. I'd like to know whether or not I'm going to be able to sleep in on Thursday. More importantly, I'd like to be able to prepare if I'm going back. There're going to be a lot of people looking for me to set a tone if I come back, and if I'm going to rise to the occasion, I'll need some preparation.

Just pass the soap so I can wash my hands of it, already.

As I mentioned earlier, I was assaulted by one of the actors in the show I am (or possibly was) stage managing. Here's what happened . . .

When the producers rented this space, they agreed to a few very absurd provisions. The most annoying involves where we store our props and set dressing. When we are running the show, we have to keep our stuff backstage right, but when we're not, we have to keep it backstage left. So when we do the last show of the week, we have to move all of their stuff out of the way, so that we can move our stuff into its new home, then put their stuff back where our stuff used to be. All of which is lots of fun because, since the actors are generally out front networking (read "drinking wine and chatting with friends"), it's Rwth (my co-stage manager) and I who have to do most of the moving.

To streamline this process, Rwth and I decided to rearrange part of the back stage before the show, so that we wouldn't have to stay out for so long dealing with the movement. In the process, we apparently blocked part of the backstage area used by two male actors as a dressing room. I learned this when one of the two, (I shall call him "the Whackedor") complained about our positioning of a large table with several props on it. It blocked off the sofa they liked to use to relax (not ours, part of the theater's rotating set pieces), and made it difficult for them to reach a mirror. I explained to them why we had moved it where we had: we were going to be doing a lot moving after the show, and we we usually can't count on the actors to help, so we were doing as much before hand as possible. He asked if we could put it somewhere else, and I said that next time, I would think about it, but for now it was best to leave things as they are.

I should note that during this conversation, I said something I immediately regretted. I can't recall what it was, but I remember thinking that my voice and word choice had made the statement slightly more acidic than it should have been. It wasn't anything horribly bad, I didn't see (then) any noticeable effects, and I couldn't see a way to immediately backtrack to it, so I just moved on. In fact, that was my tone toward the entire conversation. I didn't really care to much about it. Everyone had been given a later call, so we didn't have much time to care about it, and there were plenty of other things I was going to have to do.

Now, the Whackedor is cold. Always. When we moved into the theater, we kept the heat on. We soon realized, though, that the only person complaining of it being too cold was him. Eventually, the director, Rwth and I agreed that we'd keep the heater on before the show in most cases, but we would turn it off before we let the house in. Between the hot lights and the large crowd we often got, there was plenty of heat for everyone else, and keeping the heater on occasionally made it sweltering.

At about five or ten minutes to house open, Rwth came into the office next to the booth and told me that she turned the heater off. She wanted me to make sure I double checked it, because the Whackedor had recently been turning it back on after she turned it off. I told her that I was going into the booth and that I'd keep my eye on it from there. If anyone tried to turn it on again, I'd tell them not to.

At about three minutes to house open, I was surprised to see the Whackedor leaning over the heater. I had expected that he might have earlier, but now, we were minutes away from letting in the audience, and he was minutes away from leaving the theater to wait in the office anyway. The booth had no god mike, so I opened the window and asked, "Are you turning on the heater?"

"Yeah, I'm turning on the heater."

"Can you turn it back off? We're about to open up the house."

"No, I'm not going to do that."

"Whackedor, you can't turn the heater on right now, we're letting the audience in in a few minutes. Turn off the heater."

"Hey, fuck you. I'm freezing up here, and I'm turning the heater on. So just fuck off, all right?"

At this point, I got pissed. If he wasn't going to turn off the heater, I'd go down the and turn it off myself. If I had to stand there for the next three minutes before Rwth returned to take him to the waiting area, so be it. But the climate control of the house was my responsibility, I was the stage manager, and I do not going to back down.

I came into the theater and turned off the heater. Because the theater was small, the thermostat was located on the wall at about the line where the stage ended and the audience began. The stage was not raised, and so I was effectively on stage. The Whackedor turned to me and said, "What do you think you're doing." "I'm turning off the heater." Then the Whackedor begna to fully live up to the name I have here given him.

I can not remember the stream of invectives hurled at me. They weren't interesting at all, just verbal standins for the primal primate yell of anger that it was. There were several witty things that shot through my mind. The one I remember most clearly, in response to the Whackedor moving mere inches away from my face then screaming, "You'd better get out of my fucking face," was "I haven't moved an inch in the last sixty seconds please get out of my face." I didn't, partly because I knew it couldn't help, but mostly because I never got a chance to even say anything non snarky. After each harangue, I would start to say, calmly and quietly, "Whackedor, I am responsible for this theater." Each time, I managed to get as far as "resp." I said I don't back down, and I didn't. I wouldn't. I didn't feel the need to match his insane anger, but I didn't move an inch. Not when he started yelling at me. Not when he moved within an inch of my face, not when he threatened me.

In fact, I didn't move at all until he grabbed my shirt and shoved me backwards, still swearing at me.

There had been several actors on stage preparing for the show. I don't know specifically what they had been doing up to that point, but when the Whacked grabbed me, they immediately ran forward to hold him back. He didn't calm down. In fact, at this point, he began insulting the other cast members as well. As far as I can tell, he never calmed down. He claimed that I had disrespected him so much, between the backstage conversation and refusing to let him adjust the heater that he had no choice but to do what he did, what he was continuing to do. He threatened that if they tried to fire him, he'd refuse to go and that they'd need to call the police to haul him out.

Eventually, the director, who had been out front covering for the missing box office attendant, entered the room. At this point, seeing someone higher in the hierarchy than either myself or the actor, I relaxed and let him take the steps necessary for the situation. I didn't try to explain my side of what happened. The Whackedor seemed to want to say much more, and it seemed that any case I might want to make was better made letting him rant and threaten everyone in the room. I did say, softly, to the director and to a personal friend of mine in the cast who was also a producer, that I refused to work with him. And that if he continued to be on the cast, I would quit.

They considered cancelling the show, something they were loath to do because it was full house and a benefit performance to boot. They considered spot-replacing the Whackedor, something I think most of them were frankly afraid to do. Ultimately, they decided to go on with the show, so I informed the director and producer that I was leaving. I believe the director took my place with Rwth in the booth.


So that's why I was shaken up yesterday. I'm still a bit shaken up, but it's getting better. Last night, I had a momentary flashback to the episode. I remembered the Whackedor screaming face in front of mine; I remembered the adrenaline; I remembered grounding myself and steeling my face. But I had to laugh when I realized what had happened. I was watching The Bernie Mac Show, and Bernie Mac's girlfriend had angrily called him a whiny baby. The flashback had been triggered by thinking about how insecure, whiny, and self-centered the Whackedor is.

Yeah, I think I'll be okay.

If anyone in the L.A. area is interested in seeing the show I'm stage managing, Savage in Limbo, let me know. If you're really broke, I may be able to get a comp for thee.