Blogging Bloodworks: Blaisdell

Sometimes folks ask me where the impulse for a script originates. Most of the time, I shrug and mumble because I don’t really have an answer. But for once, with this play, I do. Ready gang? Specific catalysts include: a weekend trip to Sonoma that I took this past fall with my best bud; a Contemporary Civilization's essay I wrote on MacKinnon, Williams, and Woolf; a half-memory of watching a friend play Agaue in the Columbia Classics Department production of The Bacchae, performed in Ancient Greek; and my mentor's continuous admonishment to write what terrifies you.

Oh, and of course strange internet articles like this minor religious sect that worships Vladimir Putin and coverage of contemporary feminist fringe groups.

In conclusion, if you're around tomorrow night at 7 PM, please do come & hear this play. The cast is terrific and if you don't like it, you can punch me in the arm.

Directed by Larissa Lury

With Bradley Anderson, Helen Coxe, Darcy Fowler, Abigail Gampel, Megan Hill, Zachary Marten, Eugene Oh, Jessica Lauren-Howell, Britt Lower, Socorro Santiago, and Will Turner

Seven ladies. Three dudes. 
A hunter, a bunny, and a pomegranate.
A rite to remember.

June 12th @ 7 PM
Ma-Yi Theater Space
260 West 35th Street, Suite 203 (between 7th and 8th Avenue)

(then stick around for a Patrick Link & Eric March musical at 9 PM)

The Cult of Personality

I'm so grateful to Alex Borinsky for introducing me to Hennessy Youngman and his series, Art Thoughtz. This installment is about Personal Mythology.

What do we think about the artist as a celebrity? Is the Andy Warhol cult-of-personality phenomena applicable to playwrights? Are there any contemporary playwrights that are just as famous for their personalities as for their work? It's certainly existed in other eras: Oscar Wilde, Moliere, etc. You could probably make a case for Sam Shepard. Do these playwrights exist now? (Neil Labute, maybe?) If they do, is it a good thing? If not, should they? Is it easier to find success of you have a big or outlandish persona? WHO SHOULD WE BE?

I have some ideas....

Patrick Link should become an alcoholic womanizer, but a lovable one. Like Arthur. But Dudley Moore as Arthur. Not Russell Brand. Has anybody else noticed that Russell Brand looks weird lately?

I'd love to see Angela Hanks cut her hair short like Angela Davis and become a militant feminist. She could wear jumpsuits and berets and talk about the revolution like Patty Hearst in her whole Symbionese Army phase. Because revolutions are glamorous. So are jumpsuits.

Meghan Deans as this millennium's Dorothy Parker, lounging about in expensive hotels smoking cigarettes and saying hilarious, vicious things? Meghan already says vicious and hilarious things, so all she has to do is bob her hair and start smoking.

I'm onto something. If you want a personality, just ask. Let's do this, people!

Down On Skid Row: Or How the High School Musical Saved Me

Lately I've been obsessed with watching high school musical productions on YouTube. I don't know why. Or maybe it's because I like things that are awkward. Maybe it's because the kids are so enthusiastic and having such a great time. I don't know which. Little Shop of Horrors is an especially fun one, because there's a necessary design element that never really works out. And, sure, there's a bit of racial awkwardness in these mostly all-Caucasion productions. Not to mention there's always, like, eight doo wop girls. Still, the kids! They're having such a great time. They believe in the cause.

Sometimes it surprises people to learn that I grew up in musical theater, but I did. What's more, I love musicals. If it weren't for musicals, I never would have found the theater and I'm sure that must be the case with a lot of theater artists.

I started as the dog catcher in Annie- great role for me, as he got to wear a crisp white uniform, say something mean, and then go. I was ten and bright eyed and innocent. God, I must've been such a little shit bag. Anyway. When I as about thirteen I started discovering underground rock music, cigarettes, and sub culture but this did not do anything to lessen my love of the musical. Not right away, anyway. Hell, I had The Rocky Horror Picture Show, which I watched every single day after school for years. Years.

I kind of became a mix between a juvenile delinquent and an old show queen. I would go to the Kitsap Mall after school and shoplift grunge CDs and Broadway soundtracks in equal amounts by sticking them in my pants and walking out of the store with my shirt covering them. The Into the Woods CD was especially difficult to gank- it was a double CD. Same with Talking Heads' Sand in the Vaseline. It was the 90's and my kleptomania was in luck, as baggy pants and shirts were in.

This phase was very brief. Maybe two years? I came to view my love of rock and my love of musicals as separate. Rocky Horror was the exception and not the rule. I'm not sure why I felt like I had to be one specific thing, like "punk", or why I felt I couldn't like other kinds of music, but I did feel that way. I ended up quitting the theater for a few years so I could smoke and go to riot grrl shows in Seattle and carouse around the neighborhood with my no good-nick friends. It was a lot of fun.

Then, by 10th grade (yes, all of that badness was before) all of my friends had already dropped out of high school. Lots of them were having babies or wrestling with addictions or heavy things like that. I decided to clean up my act and part of that was auditioning for the school play, The Real Inspector Hound by Tom Stoppard. I played Moon, the pseudo intellectual theater critic. A natural fit, of course. And then I was in Fiddler on the Roof. And then I couldn't remember why I ever left the theater. And the rest is, as they say, history. I ended up staying in school and graduating and going to college etc. Why did I ever think I couldn't like both Cole Porter and Sonic Youth? I don't know. But I do know I was on one path and being in plays after school got me off of it.

I think there's a part of me that feels sad that theater is so far out of our pop culture. And I don't mean this to say "play should be more poppy" or anything like that. I like a wide range of plays, from the very sophisticated to the not-so-much. I mean "pop" like popular, not like soda. Anyway. All of this was to say, please... no matter what happens... no matter what budgets we cut... let's keep the high school musical. Just... maybe don't do The Wiz if your school is short on racial diversity.

Spidey and the Haters

I just bought a ticket to see Spiderman: Turn Off The Dark, and I feel compelled to contribute via the Youngblog regarding the bizarre, swirling cloud of public speculation, schadenfreude, and calamity that surrounded the show even long before anybody had seen anything. At this point the show is still in previews, so technically even now nobody has really seen anything. And yet people delight in hating on it, even before they've seen it, which says to me that they aren't hating on the show, they are hating on the artists' attempt to make it.

Basically, this is what I want to say.

I have no patience for the haters.

None. I just don’t. Especially the haters who are members of the theater community. Look, why are you gonna shit on fellow artists who have taken on a massive challenge in the hopes of achieving something magical? Are you jealous? Are you jaded? Or do you straight up have an astonishingly tiny mind?

It is disheartening that so many people are rooting for these artists to fail. It’s hard enough. Failure is the looming specter that haunts every artist, from the moment we dress up in whatever uniform we’ve been assigned and pretend to care about coffee, office management, or mail-sorting, to the moment we entreat all our friends on Facebook to please come to our summer Fringe show in a non-air conditioned 6th story walkup tenement black-box theater, to the moment our mothers call to politely remind us that the uterus is not a canned good, that a twin bed is not cute after college, and that we do not contribute to society in any measurable way. Okay, so maybe Julie isn’t doing tenement black-box shows anymore, but still, compared to other professions, the deck is stacked, my friends. Do we also need our fellow artists screaming for our blood?

Some people say that what bothers them is the amount of money being “wasted” on this project. First of all, let’s remember something. This is America, where the auto industry gets public money and the arts do not. If rich people want to make an investment in theater, let them! For God’s sake, let them! That’s awesome! Others rail against the show’s high ticket prices, which render this and most other Broadway shows inaccessible to average people. Yeah, that definitely sucks, but that’s what happens when you both try to pay artists living wages and try to do it with no public funding.

I chafe at this trend of blaming artists for working within the system to create their work. If the issue is ticket prices, blame our government and our voters for not supporting the arts. And if the issue is the Hollywood-fueled superhero worship, blame the audience for liking what they like. Don’t blame the artists for making the show that people want to see, and for attempting to do cartwheels down the tightrope between commerce and art that we all must navigate.

All this is not to say that smaller, weirder, cheaper theater isn’t worthwhile. I love it. I make it. I pay to see it. But there are some things that can be accomplished with a massive budget that cannot be accomplished without it. This is fact. Why should we shackle the people who have somehow wrangled access to those resources? Why do we want more limits to the variety of what we as a community can accomplish?

I’ve been rooting for Spiderman for years now, ever since I passed by the loading dock area for the theater while the doors were open and saw a dark jungle of cables and rigging dangling from the grid. I stopped and gaped. I was excited. I wanted to witness this. I was willing to save up the money and spend it on an event, one that would take its place in the litany of experiences that add up to my life on this planet. This is the point, people! This is why we do this!!

So yeah. Don’t hate on our own. Because whether you think it's good or not is completely irrelevent to whether or not they should try.