Orpheus

I've started rehearsing a workshop with Filament Theatre--a clown treatment of the Orpheus myth. The idea is that Orpheus and Eurydice are clowns, and every other force in their world (the snake, Hades, the Bacchae) is played by a trio of bouffons. I really, really like this idea, and not just because I get to play Orpheus. Omen--the director--is an alumnus of the Accademia dell'Arte, so we've trained with many of the same people, and as we rehearse I'm finding the direct, practical lines between our classwork and production.

In unrelated news, I don't usually use this blog to plug specific projects, but this one is a bit different. My song "Half" is in the running to be on the soundtrack for a documentary about the Cubs. Which is really exciting. It's open to audience voting until April 17, so if you're looking for ways to kill a little extra time at work, please visit the movie site and vote for me.

Miscellany

Two readings this weekend--The Nose with Piven and Rhinoceros with Signal Ensemble--confirm that, yes, I'm back in Chicago theater, and yes, I'm enjoying it, and yes, certain things have changed in the way I approach the work. In The Nose there's a doctor character whom I recognized instantly for a Dottore--and that makes sense, since Gogol did a lot of writing in Italy (and said he had to come to Rome to see Russia properly). And in Rhinoceros I spent a lot of time thinking about masks, how you'd create them, how you'd perform with them.

The absurdity of The Nose is very much of a piece with Rhinoceros, despite the century or so that separates their creation. Gogol and Ionesco both managed to tap into a certain motherlode of absurdity that transcends eras--certainly one that goes beyond any specific movement of absurdism. Certain writers can do that. I'd also place Molière, Plautus, Kafka, and Cervantes in the group. There are others--we can all get to that frame of mind, which is part of why it's such effective art--but getting there as an artist is damn hard. I suppose that's part of why I went to Italy.

This weekend I also learned that a really splendid Chicago actor I know has just been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. And he doesn't have health insurance. And because of that he had to leave the hospital.

I don't care how much lip service we pay to the importance of the arts; this is a damn shoddy way to treat our artists.

The Chicago theater community is rallying with all sorts of benefits and things--carpools to give him rides to chemo, for example--that make me proud and happy to be an actor here. But as a citizen, I'm embarrassed that these measures are necessary. As my friend Josh put it, American taxpayers now own the largest insurer in the world, and we still can't manage to offer health care to everyone. There has to be a better way.

Happy New Year

2008 has been the kind of year that defies synopsis. There was the whole long wretched winter, the loss of far too many beloved people, the layoff, the car. But there was also clowning, working with Strange Tree, going to New York with Joe, starting a couple of really exciting writing projects, and of course studying in Italy.

I haven't yet made any resolutions for 2009, because it feels as though as soon as I came back from Italy I dove into something quite like the life I want to have. I've been pursuing performance and writing opportunities with a vigor (and, to my own surprise, an enjoyment) unlike anything I've had before. It feels strangely good. Really good. Strong.

To some extent, I guess, this is just the confidence born of experience. I've been out in the world doing this stuff for about ten years, now, and apparently that's the magic amount of time. And it's hard not to emerge from a program like the ADA without some concrete knowledge of your own abilities.

Some of this confidence, though, comes from the really astonishing and wonderful support of my friends and family. This was a big, risky year for me, involving several giant leaps of faith. It would have been so much harder, if not impossible, without all the little messages of support, the hugs, even the comments on this blog--to say nothing of the car trips, the visits, the mail collection, subletting the apartment, watering the plants, saving copies of the November 5 Chicago newspapers.

For 2009, I wish you all this kind of sustaining love, support, courage, and passion. And I hope you use it to challenge yourself in some crazy, ridiculous, wonderful way.

R.I.P. Harold Pinter

Theater lost a giant yesterday, one of its definitive voices. In tribute, here's his 2005 Nobel lecture.

It's now incumbent on each of us to speak up, speak out, speak the truth, and speak it in our own impossible voices.

Ciao bella

I landed in Chicago Thursday night, after a clown journey that eventually involved 19 hours of travel, one taxi, a train, three buses, three planes, and a hired car. Chicago was its pretty, sparkly winter self. Since then, of course, the weather has turned awful, has plunged into the sort of cold that makes you question every event in the series of decisions that brought you here. I've promptly developed a head cold, and the impending fact of Christmas seems entirely unreal.

Some farewell views of Arezzo and the villa:

The Christmas lights on the Corso, and our constant companion, the Duomo, settling into shadow on my last evening.

From an upstairs window, here's a view of our courtyard, and the Teatrino, the studio where the theater students spent long hours.

And, also from upstairs, some views of the land around us. In the first shot, the lean-to roof at the bottom left is the area where we ate when the weather was warm enough.



I could have chosen to stay there, and I didn't. I guess that merits an explanation. It's not as simple as the one given by an Aretino student I talked to one day at the bus stop. "I hate Arezzo!" he said, in plaintive English. "There aren't any funs." By this he meant nightclubs, concerts, that sort of thing--and it's true that Arezzo is fairly small, about the same size as Las Cruces, and after a mere three months we students routinely encountered acquaintances on the street. But it's also beautiful, and the proximity of city to farm is something special. And the Accademia is full of people I adore and respect.

No, it's just time to be back here, to do the work that is before me, to brave the cold and use everything I've learned and be a full-time writer and actor and musician. Had I stayed, I'd be an administrator, surrounded by art and learning but not really participating, without even the mitigating possibility of nighttime rehearsals and shows. That was what it came down to: A desk job in paradise is still a desk job.

So I'm here, in this great chilly studio of a city. It'll be very interesting to see what happens next.

Lexicon of the Accademia

Most of the students have just left for the Florence airport. I'm here for a few more days to clean and inventory. It feels impossibly lonely without the whole ensemble. I realize too that we have developed our own special language, that only 34 people on the planet speak it, that my friends in Chicago will probably look at me oddly if I greet them with 'giorno, and that Ciao bella! will come off as an affectation rather than a sincere compliment.

A sampling of this language, dying even now:

Dov'è...? Where is...?
The first Italian words many of us mastered. Used in a number of creole questions: "Dov'è the hell is my roommate?" (in Venice), "Dov'è my sword?" (in a commedia scene with a Capitano). Also misused with remarkable versatility: "Hey, I have to go dov'è the bagno."

Ma... But...
Used especially to separate and emphasize two halves of a difficult choice, or two mutually exclusive options: "My recital is tomorrow night, MA I have to stay up tonight studying for music history. And I've just had a liter of vino."

Pregs, short for Prego You're welcome.
Also, depending on context, can mean any number of the following: Hello; don't mention it; what sort of coffee would you like; of course you should have some more wine; you go first; I am holding the door for you; it doesn't matter that you have trodden on my foot; you butcher my language, American girl, and your clothing is remarkably unflattering compared to what an Italian tailor could do, but I will maintain civility.

Ragazzis. Teenagers, especially in groups, especially smoking, or doing what they are not supposed to be doing, or not doing what they are supposed to be doing.
The real plural is ragazzi, but Ryan started using ragazzis and it just stuck. This was how the music director of The Persians referred to the liceo students with whom we were collaborating.

San Fab San Fabbiano, the winery up the road, or its red wine, which one purchases by the liter from a gas-pump-style dispenser.

The Salad The Sala Danza, or dance room, one of our movement studios. A.k.a. (of course) the Tony Danza.

Va bene. It's all good.
Notable especially for the permutations among American students: Va bens; Va bensies; Va benzo, Lorenzo (the last of which Joe invented as a parody of the others; it's even better if you imagine the look of horror on the face of the Italian man backing away from your high-five). Students also coined no bene to indicate the opposite, "Not good" or "That's awful," but it is such a departure from true Italian as to horrify even some of the American students.

Ciao. Hello, hi.
Also "goodbye." In this latter usage, when all the other students are hauling their luggage out of the villa, it becomes the hardest word in the world to say.

Paghanini

I have a new clown. His/her name is Paghanini--one of those ambiguous-gender clowns. Not at all bright. Variously described as a hound and a Neanderthal when angry, which happens often and suddenly. But also really joyous when dancing. Paghanini's dance is a sort of stiff-armed popping and flapping; Allie called it a bouncy penguin dance. Paghanini is much more impatient than my other clowns. That's an interesting feeling to work with; though it's hard to say, given the brevity of the vignettes we're working on, I think it means in a longer scene Paghanini would make more things happen. So he/she may eventually be higher-status than other clowns I've had. Too much of a spaz to be the #1 (or, as Eli calls it, an In Clown), but conceivably a #2 in a trio.

We're working in nose and whiteface. No talking in nose. My clowns have always been fairly quiet (or limited to tiny, tiny vocabularies, like okay and please and that's it), but the discipline of total silence is really instructive. There is just so much you can do with gesture when it's honest. And I think the absence of language lets us mostly avoid the trap of trying to be clever.

It's been amazing, too, to see the changes whiteface wreaks in my classmates' faces. Rich--who's typically pretty bouncy and cuddly--turns into something scary; the makeup brings out all the sharp points in his face. Ryan, normally animated, becomes an incredibly deadpan neutral clown named Lars. His head is shaved and he never smiles. He drew in his eyebrows exactly parallel to his mouth. You could actually draw an oval with two lines for brows, two dots for eyes, a red dot for the nose, and another line for the mouth, and you'd have a reasonably accurate portrait of Lars. Liza, a Hermia type, becomes a wide-eyed three-year-old who's wandered out of bed and into the grown-ups' cocktail party. Vanessa is about the same size as Liza, but she turns into Margherite, who's stone-faced and humorless, the highest-status clown in the room. She looks like the ballet instructor who doesn't mind telling you that you should probably progress to anorexia, because the bulimia is not doing enough for your thighs.

Other aspects of clown don't change. It's exhilarating work, but outside the classroom you do start running into everyday actions that suddenly seem fraught with comic or tragic import, and you've lowered the barriers that would ordinarily keep you from expressing those feelings fully. Picking up a dishrag thrusts you instantly into the trauma of daily domestic life, for example. It's good that we're all living and working together, because all the theater students are going through the same thing, and we don't have to explain these moments to each other.