Weekend Round-up

Here's Kipper showing why it's so easy to find excuses not to write. Good intentions often get trumped by someone who really wants attention right now and will sit on your pad of paper to make sure he gets it. One of the things I was trying to do on that paper was try out my new fountain pen (which I think I neglected to mention when it came last week -- I really do need to have some minions and/or acolytes! What kind of a cult is the Cult of Kaity if it remains minion-less?!).

The Victorian which I got from His Nibs is quite lovely and looks suitably retro to be either steampunk or a murder weapon in a Wilkie Collins novel. Inspiring to write with -- or that's the plan. I did manage to get a good bit of writing done this weekend after a week of mostly frustration and discarded dreck. Like the man said, sometimes the magic works and sometimes it doesn't.

Sunday I took part in the first of what will be a monthly series of open mic readings at the Arts Center in Troy. Hosted by Dan Wilcox and Nancy Klepsch, it featured both poetry and prose! Okay, let me repeat that: PROSE! All the open mics around here are open to poets only. Why doesn't prose get the love, too? Part of the reason I started Prose at the Rose is because there are precious few outlets for reading prose. I love reading, I love hearing other people read, but no one but poets allowed in most readings. So kudos, Dan and Nancy. I read "Vironsusi" from Unikirja and it seemed to go over well, despite going over the time limit (d'oh! just cut me off next time, I told Dan). Second Sunday of the month at 2pm will be the regular slot. Come on by and bring something to read.

One more thing I forgot: here's one of the costumes from A Winter's Tale at Shakespeare and Co. They had some out in the lobby at The Real Inspector Hound. It's always so lovely to see the fine craftsmanship on the costumes up close. Really wonderful work. They had one of Richard III's costumes there, too. Wonderful work. I forgot, too, to mention that when Inspector Hound made his entrance at last, he had these steampunk accessories which made me laugh.

Review: A Disappearing Number and The Real Inspector Hound

The National Theatre live broadcast of A Disappearing Number proved to be a stunning experience. A heady mix of drama, math, physics, love, romance, ritual, music, classical Indian dance and rhythms -- it sounds too complicated to work, but it does. In fact, it's kind of magical. Put together by the theatre company Complicite, this production explained a lot of complicated math, but weaved it together with a love story, a history lesson, an explanation of the beauty of numbers and their patterns, an insightful examination of the situation for an Indian in Britain before the first world war and the ways we build our own private languages of love.

It sounds like an awkward jigsaw puzzle of clashing pieces: yet it was over two hours of non-stop dazzle of ideas, characters, ritual and movement. This is the kind of piece that shows all theatre can be, how it can be so much more than a story unfolding on stage before an audience. It was exciting, it was enthralling and it was inspiring. Thank you, Spectrum 8 for carrying the broadcasts; thank you, National Theatre for broadcasting these productions; thank you Complicite for visionary theatre; thank you to a talented cast and crew for a spellbinding experience.

Sunday was the last performance of Stoppard's The Real Inspector Hound at Shakespeare & Co. As one of Stoppard's early plays, it's more about playful and clever fun than about weighty issues, though there's an underlying almost hysterical theme of anxiety about the elasticity of reality as the observers get dragged into the play they're observing. This element, however, became completely buried with the focus on physical humor.

Directed by actor Jonathan Croy, the cast made the most of the opportunities for slapstick wackiness, even making the dementedly brilliant choice to have the charwoman, Mrs. Drudge, be blind. The actors had a ball. Moon and Birdboot, the two critics reviewing the play and talking through it, were sitting next to us in the first row stage left. It really invited audience interaction, which happened, including a young man telling the two troublemakers at the end of the interval that he hoped they would be less disruptive in the second half.

Second half: that was the problem. This is a one act play. All the slapstick inserts helped stretch it to two hours with an interval. You could really feel the stretching in the first half. Stoppard's dialogue suits a snappy pacing that ties the moments together. All the inserted bits subsumed the dialogue. The physical humor clearly pleased the audience and the actors seemed to be having a ball. It was fun, and I was probably the only one chafing at the slackness of the pace. The set pieces like the card games and the tea service were funny, but also brought the story to a standstill, so it had to start up again and pick up speed once more. They may have decided that a one-act would not leave an audience feeling as if it got its money's worth; when the Home Made Theatre Company put it on, they added The Fifteen Minute Hamlet, which made a nice addition to the production. Great fun.

By the by, I got my contributor's copy of this so I conclude it's available now. The volume includes my essays "The Gilda Stories" and "The Vampire Lifestyle":

Publication: Sex and How to Get It

Drop by Polite Company magazine to see my humor piece, "Sex and How to Get It." Worth a chuckle or two, I hope. Feel free to leave a comment or repost it to Twitter or Facebook. That's how word of mouth spreads these days.

Which reminds me: Kit Marlowe's The Big Splash can now be purchased through Amazon as well as with the publisher, so now it's listed on GoodReads and LibraryThing as well. Reviews or recommendations would be really helpful! If you've read it, consider offering your opinion in any of the above.

Off this afternoon to catch the last performance of Stoppard's The Real Inspector Hound at Shakespeare & Co. You know much I love Stoppard. I've seen other productions of this play, so it will be fun to see S&Co's take on it. Witty and lively and full of clever twists and turns, it's a play as much about the theatre experience as it is a tightly plotted murder mystery.

Shakespeare-a-Go-Go

I set off Sunday for a Shakespeare double-header with my theatre buddy, Ron, and got all the way to Massachusetts to fill up on cheap gas before I discovered that I had left my check card in the cash machine: D'oh!

We got to Shakespeare & Co for the first order of the day: A Winter's Tale. I had seen a production last year at the Old Vic with Sinead Cusack and Simon Russell Beale, part of Sam Mendes' Bridge Project. It's not ever been one of my fave plays: it's got an awkward juxtaposition of tragedy and comedy that I've always found jarring. Shakespeare uses one of his favorite ruses: the capricious monarch. Of course he always gives them good speeches to sell that caprice. Leontes gets a good one here and the staging and Jonathan Epstein make it convincing, and Elizabeth Aspenlieder makes you weep for her. The wacky second half in the wilds of Bohemia were funny and even included a fantastic dance by the horned men in masks. Truly pagan!

We walked the grounds discussing the play afterward and decided to make it a triple-header by attending the free performance at the Rose Footprint Theatre, a pastiche of the Bard and the theories about "the real Shakespeare" performed by the interns in the Training Institute. It was a lot of fun. I had seen many of the same actors in the lively performance of The Comedy of Errors earlier in the season. Much fun and we didn't regret that it left us a very short time for dinner. Fortunately there were still box lunches left so it was possible to have a well-balanced meal before the final play.

Yes, I had seen Richard III before. It had been in previews yet, so I was intrigued to see changes. Wow, it was tighter than ever and John Douglas Thompson just as riveting as before (and my how he can schvitz!). I love how they make the crowd complicit in Richard's elevation. It is glorious fun. While Richard is the center of the story, it's really the women I remembered most, from cursing Margaret (Elizabeth Ingram), mourning Ann (Leia Espericueta, who was hilarious in A Winter's Tale) and the tragic Elizabeth embodied by the amazing Tod Randolph, who goes from casual confidence to beaten weariness by the end. A fantastic production: it was closing day for the summer season, so a lot of the actors were gathering with friends at the end of the day. A celebratory mood: it was certainly earned. Well done, S&Co.

Work beckons: so much to get done. Where's that idleness that my pseudo-sabbatical was supposed to bring? Oh, I did do one useful thing: I got an excerpt of Pelzmantel up on Scribd. Don't know why I didn't think of it before!