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The House of Yes, a Thursday Afternoon Productions production, opens this month at the Acrosstown Repertory Theatre. It should be pointed out that neither this nor any of the group's previous productions play or has played on a Thursday Afternoon. My guess is this happened on a Thursday afternoon:
"Casey Stern, Brian Tamm and I saw the movie Night of the Living Dead a couple of years ago, and either Casey or Brian threw out the idea that it would be a great play to produce," explained House of Yes director Esther Bigg.
Amy Grantham plays Jackie–O in what playwright Wendy MacLeod has called "a suburban Jacobean play," alluding to the sinister and intriguing dramas of seventeenth century England. Grantham is stunning. Something Thursday Afternoon seems to specialize in. The company's previous leading lady in a pair of Neil LaButte dramas was the spellbinding Julie Tidwell.
Jay Lay, with the chutzpah of a stand–up comic, plays Marty Pascal, who brings his relatively normal fiancée Lesly, played by Angela Libbey, home to meet his wacky family. And you say, Here we go again. But not really.
Because Lezli Johnson plays Marty's mom, Mrs. Pascal. "Lezli has the ability to make any idea, no matter how absurd it may seem, sound like it is perfectly logical," explained Bigg of her casting choice. "In a household where her children's sense of reality has become blurred with fantasy, Mrs. Pascal maintains an image that suggests that her family is a model American family, a family to be admired."
Something called The 24 Hour Plays opened the season at Constans Theatre on the University of Florida campus recently. The idea was this: Six playwrights would gather with six directors and enough actors to populate their dramas. And within twenty–four hours they would magically produce six new plays.
Along with Ntzoke Shange, David Varquez, Marilyn Maple, Karen Gagnon, and Stephen Blackwell, I was one of the playwrights.
We arrived at Constans at nine o'clock on Friday night, September 26, all the constituent elements of a production, save an audience and the script.
Ntzoke Shange is one of the modern world's pre–eminent playwrights, the author of for colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf and a professor of women's studies and gender issues at UF.
David Varquez is a New York City playwright who collaborated with Fernando Rivas on the musical El Bluebird at UF in 1999. These days he's working on a re–write of Gesualdo for the Shooting Gallery in NYC.
Dr. Marilyn Maple co–founded the Arts in Medicine program at Shands Hospital, and she writes plays and screenplays. Karen Gagnon and Stephen Blackwell are students in the UF theatre program.And, well, you know me.
Twenty–six actors in costumes various then paraded across the stage, carrying props. They, introduced themselves, were photographed, and left. They could then sleep through the night. So could the directors.
We playwrights could not. We had to pick our cast of characters and fashion a ten–page script before six a.m.
Twenty–six snapshots were spread out before us on a table. With producer Kevin Marshall, the chair of UF's Theater Department, presiding, we chose one actor at a time, like the NFL on Draft Day.
I made the Girl on Roller Skates my first pick. It was an easy choice. Then I chose the Girl in the Blond Wig and the Slinky Black Dress.
Both choices were informed by external factors. I knew the two actresses. I had worked with Katherine Cotter and Alicia Giangriostomi in As You Like It at the Acrosstown Repertory Theatre last spring.
This is a playwriting trick at least as old as Shakespeare. You write parts for actors you know.
I very cleverly decided to name Katie and Alicia Katie and Alicia. This I thought would save time and effort. Then I began to worry that it might confuse them.
The first thing you realize when going about it this way is that you're doing it all wrong. You don't pick the characters first and then write a play about them.
Then there's the lure of easy laughs, instant gratification. But good karma will give you that too.
One goal, I suppose, of each participant was to avoid embarrassment. Which is like playing Not to Lose. Not only are these not optimal playing conditions, it is the opposite of what Bertolt Brecht propounds in his poem "On Everyday Theatre," where he writes:
How useful
Such theatre is though, serious and funny
And how dignified! They do not, like parrot or ape
Imitate just for the sake of imitation, unconcernedWhat they imitate, just to show that they
Can imitate; no, they
Have a point to put across.
I was reading Anna Karenina and Henry Miller's The Books in My Life that day. Both texts bubbled to the surface as I settled down with my composition book and a Harp at the Shamrock. Relationships and depths of consciousness – lovers breathing together, and I wanted to work the word "horriplating" into the conversation, when the hair stands up on the back of you neck.
This should be easy, I thought, because this is what I do all the time. I sit at the bar and scribble snatches of dialogue – the ones I'm overhearing or the ones I'm hearing in my head, those that signal schizophrenia, a benign affliction for a playwright.
I left the Shamrock just before midnight feeling confident. I had some lines that might make a scene or two. I had some scenes that were like shots in a movie. They were just exchanges. It was a start.
I drove home and went to work. But after happily typing up the shots I'd composed at the Shamrock and stitching them together in a makeshift plot about a UPS man delivering a mysterious package, I began to find the whole thing distasteful.
The plot hinged on the worst kind of deus ex machina contrivances. It was bad. I made an immediate judgment. "Do you want to save the changes you made to Document One?" Like a fool, I said, "No."
And away it all went. This goes against all the knowledge I had painfully and then pleasurably acquired through twenty–five years of writing practice. You do not make snap judgements about your writing in the heat of composition.
But there I was. Two o'clock in the morning with nothing to show for five hours' work. Panic nibbled at my consciousness. Hang it up. It would be humiliating. The five other playwrights would turn in scripts. Not I.
I thought about going to sleep for an hour or so and getting a fresh start. But how could I sleep with this hanging over my head?
I started to come unraveled. Then, instinctively, I started hitting the keys, focusing on my cast. There was Katie, whom I had acted with when she played Rosalind, the smartest woman in all of Shakespeare. Katie could handle snappy patter – if I could come up with some. And she could convey a depth of emotion.
Alicia was parodying strumpets in her costume choice, just as she had as Phoebe in As You Like It.
With the two actresses blending into their characters, a known quantity, I had a purchase on it, a starting point. It was just a matter of matching them up with the UPS Man and a Hipster, for whom I had chosen two fine actors – Stephen Kaiser and Matt Cippaghilia.
I had gotten to the point, by three o'clock in the morning, where I was just trying to come up with lines that the actors could learn, and it would be a bonus if they liked saying them too. I matched them up in different combinations, then shuffled the lines and scenes around, thinking of the actors off stage, waiting to come on. Only two characters at a time. Structure equals plot.
By four in the morning, I was giddy and printing it up. I called it Parallel Universe.
There was still no crack of dawn in the sky when I returned to McCarty Hall at 5:30am to turn in my script. David Varquez and Marilyn Maple, both in black, were strolling away from Constans Theatre into the remnants of the night.
I went home, slept an hour, then got up and ran the Dog Days 5K. Afterward, I poured myself an ice coffee, and went back to UF to watch rehearsal.
"Damn you, Shamrock," Mikell Pinkey greeted me as I walked into the rehearsal he was directing. He is a nice guy. He also is one hell of a director. He located the play in adjoining apartments, and much of the dialogue took on something like the depth of text as he staged it on dueling computer screens.
The man found the Parallel Universe. Props to him. He quizzed me on it briefly at rehearsal, as did the actors, and I was absolutely no use to them, so I beat it. I went home and slept till opening night.
Dirt Devil, directed by David Young, was a curious circus skit aspiring to surrealism, a noble attempt.
Ntzoke Shange's Sahara Club, directed by Tony Mata, established its dreamy tone and hard–edged characters economically, addressing both gender and racial issues with surety and aplomb, urbanizing the tribe, mythologizing.
David Varquez's Embarcadero, directed by David Shelton, was flamboyant, bringing both coasts somehow onto its seascape setting, invoking the World Trade Center and Broadway from the misty distance of San Francisco.
Stephen Blackwell's The Cigarette Incident, directed by J. Salome Martinez, >was full of the impetuosity of youth, funny, repetitive, over the top.
Marilyn Mayple's Street Scenes, was directed by Judith Williamson, with some actors surrendering to their worst instincts, and many amid the college crowd missing its allegorical point about Gainesville's downtown redevelopment.
And my play? You shoulda been there.