Catching Up A Little

It's been a long, long, looong time since my last post.  

Since the end of the Before Times and then the Pandemic lockdown I've suddenly gotten busy with theater set design again (woohoo!) and have been mentoring students and, obviously, haven't felt the need to write much.  But all  my original reasons for blogging remain... so I'll try to get better about posting.

So we'll see.

This week's "busy" was cranking out - as fast as possible - two sets of construction drawings for one show in Fort Worth, Stage West's production of Handle With Care, and a production of Ebenezer Scrooge in Carrollton for Pocket Sandwich Theatre.  This is my first design for this beloved theater institution! and their first show in their new theater space.  This is my first chance to design this evergreen Christmas classic so I'm excited.  Also under development is a new work Que Sera, Giant Monster at Tarrant College SE which will open in November.

Busy!

Between my last post and this one was a whole show, Founders, Keepers, at Echo Theatre.  Here's a quick pic:

Outside the classroom's windows is an apocalypse happening in D.C.  Funny thing, all my playwrights have apocalypses in their plays.  Weird huh?

Okay, Okay, Okay

 Sorry... it's been a crazy Spring.  But the big message here (the reason I'm finally posting) is:

Go See The Shows!

I have two shows onstage at this moment:  Into the Breeches! at Stage West in Fort Worth and Hi5 at Kitchen Dog Theater in Dallas.  If you're within driving range of either or both, they're worth seeing.  

Into the Breeches! is a charming play about a play.  Set in 1942, a theatrical group decides to go ahead and stage Shakespeare's "Henry" plays, even though the men are all off to WWII.  Very funny.

Hi5 is a collection of brand new short plays: wild, weird, moving, funny, thought-provoking.

More posts soon, now that I've cleared my board of three plays and a fun mentoring gig.

Getting Busier...

Theater biz is looking up!

I have a new show to design, this time for Echo Theatre, In A Word by Lauren Yee, opening March 18th.  So... I need to hurry up, huh?  My first discussion with the director is this evening.  Meanwhile, I've been reading and rereading, and noting.  There might be a few little scribbles happening...

And I'm starting that student mentorship.  First meeting - due to covid - was virtual, but it's face-to-face tomorrow morning at what will feel like dawn.  (Extra coffee please!)  A rush hour drive to Fort Worth?  It seems against the theater ethos doesn't it.

One of the first things we'll do is discuss the script for Stage West's upcoming play, Witch.  Here's a coolo play poster for the 1621 Restoration play upon which it is based.

Well... when it loads it will be....

Made in 1621?  Gotta be public domain by now and, anyway, fair/education use

My Theater Dance Card

Dance cards were a thing a lady used to have at a ball - a charming little booklet with an attached dainty gilded pencil to mark down promised dances and her gentlemanly partners.

 Dance card image courtesy of Wikimedia

I've always kept a scribbly, scabby version of a dance card myself, to remember what shows I've promised to design, for which theater group.

Well, I did until covid.

Today (while updating my theater how-to book Alice Through the Proscenium, watch for this new expanded! edition's publication date) I happened to need to refer back in time, to see what shows I was juggling in 2019-2020.  After I remembered that I had a little black book, found it, and blew off the dust, I saw... well, the perfect illustration of just exactly what covid did to the schedules of every theater artist.

Here's my dance card for 2018 and 2019:

Thirteen shows I designed in 2019, for eight different theaters.  In 2020 it was eleven shows, seven theaters, and an Off-Broadway showcase.

Here it is for 2020 and 2021:

Two real shows I designed that actually appeared on stage, one speculative hypnotism show that did not, a cancelation and... blankitude...

That's what covid was like for me and for most of us for those two years.

House Lights Up!

It begins...

The first meeting of Stage West's theater design apprenticeship isn't until Thursday, but I spent this morning setting up a Discord server to act as our classroom / treehouse.  Our first meeting will - thanks covid! - be virtual, so we'll get to use this treehouse immediately.  My fingers are crossed that this will be an easier, friendlier virtual venue than, say, Zoom.  (Don't we all hate Zoom meetings by now?) 

The photo above is from a Dallas Museum of Art show that I said I'd report back on... Too late now!  But I will just say that museums are one of the few outings right now that are, generally, less crowded and feel safer - go mid-week or early in the day if you can.  (Don't we all need to get out the house?)

BTW the architectural art exhibit "For a Dreamer of Houses" was fascinating.  You can get a good idea of it HERE virtually.  The neon house Rubber Pencil Devil by Alex da Corte was cool, but my favorite environment was Francisco Moreno's Chapel.  A wonderful, intricate, evocative neo-Romanesque barrel-vaulted chapel - of plywood - completely covered with graphics... as if a 12th century monastery chapel got anachronistic tattoos.  Some of them inked by Titian...

DMA show "For Dreamers of Houses" - photos by Clare Floyd DeVries 

Anyway, get out however you safely can and see stuff and learn stuff!

Even The Greats Goof

 Washing dishes today, I scrubbed at the cookie jar we keep on the top of the cabinets.  Being architects, our cookie jar is, of course, an architectural one... a white china replica of Andrea Palladio's Villa Rotunda.

I'd never noticed before - not while studying the drawings, not while visiting the building in Italy - but Palladio couldn't quiiiiite get enough headroom for his spiral stairs under his perfectly 4-way symmetrical roof design.  He had to cheat a bit.  

Look at the cookie jar roof!

Proof!  Proof, I tell you!  Even a genius struggles with getting the roof to  work!

Villa Rotunda cookie jar / model - with Fallen-Over Tower of Pisa beyond

I find it heartening to know that.

(Not that you can see his little oopsie in real life... and that's all that matters.  Remember that!)

 Happy New Year!

New year, new projects.  

Today I'm happily sitting down to try to figure out the shape of this set design mentorship I'm starting at Stage West.  (First meeting date has just been set, an hour ago, for January 20th.  It's real!  To quote Almost Famous "It's happening!")  

At the moment this all-important program outline is just a bare list of important dates and critical things-to-achieve...  The students - my students! - will observe two other shows in the making and be really involved with the play I'm designing, Into the Breeches!  The concrete result of this program (besides invaluable scenic knowledge, of course) should be developing their set design portfolios.

I guess we'll be meeting, in person or virtually, once a week or so, to do....

...something-that-I'll-figure-out-here-any-minute...

Though I do have ideas.  A few ideas.  Well, very MANY ideas.  So excited!

OK, OK, OK, It's Been A While

A lot has been happening with me... but little of it theater related, hence the looooong pause between blog posts here.  

(Quick non-theater update: I've driven to Seattle and California and back; stayed with family; celebrated holidays; finished a remodeling; Minecrafted; and read, including the thick doorstop bricks Stephen King's It and the new Diana Gabaldon in the Outlander series, Go Tell the Bees That I am Gone.  Oh and, professionally interesting if personally sad, I got to walk round a newly burned-down home - not mine - and saw first hand what that looks like.  My next "burned-out" set will be more realistic.)

But I've got - still as of this date - a new show to design, To the Breeches! at Stage West in Fort Worth, which opens in June.  And I have been asked to mentor 2-3 set design students this spring.  Fantastic!

There are signs that theater is returning to something more like normal - despite Broadway opening and closing due to covid like a blinking marque lightbulb.  (The Rockettes have had to cancel Christmas shows!).  It is, I guess, heartwarming? to see that not even theater critics have killed off by a mere plague in the playhouses...?  I mean, unkind theater artists might have pictured drama critics gnawing over old bones, fingering brittle old clippings of past reviews, and quietly starving for lack of new shows, but no!  They were only sharpening their teeth on those bones!  Critics yet live!

Washington Post theater critic, Pater Marks, just wrote a STINKER of a review for a new Broadway musical.  I have not seen the show so I have no idea if this review is accurate or fair, I'm only heartened to see that theatrical criticism is even now pawing the ground, er, auditorium carpet, to sink its teeth into its work.  

I'll quote the first couple rabid sentences shall I?

"In the category of bad trips, few Broadway offerings at the moment (thus saving ink for later disembowelings of other shows, see?) can compete with "Flying Over Sunset," the turgid new musical about celebrities on LSD."

"Turgid," in the very first sentence too!  

Then the reviewer compliments set designer Beowulf Borritt and projection designers 59 Productions with "smartly realized" before declaring the show as a whole "an entertainment about as scintillating as an Agriculture Department instructional video on crop irrigation."  (Thereby guaranteeing resentment between the director and the complimented designers.  Sigh.  I suggest Mr. Borritt and the 59 folks print out this review, frame it, then hide it somewhere no one else will ever ever see it except, sometimes, themselves when they need a little boost, as when, say, a future director is being annoying.)

Oh, it goes on...  "tedious," "long-winded and impossibly earnest," "unremarkable score," "lumbering book," "the terrible lyric,"  (he's right there, it IS a terrible lyric, "I am a giant penis rocket ship!"  WT...Heck?).  "With so little plot..." etc. etc. 

You get the idea: 

Theater Criticism Is Back, Baby!