Rain, indeed, today. A slick and soggy dreamscape. Non-stop since early on and continuing now into the afternoon. I must enter into its stream soon enough, soon enough as well, while on my way into the day itself, as I errand and meet and move through space and time.
Work progresses. Monday, I filmed Camille Morin's piece, Over Again, based on cuttings from Beckett. Rehearsals continue for The Magnificent Ambersons, and a reading on the 21st of Edward Einhorn's Rudolf II. Today we meet about The Beelzebub Sonata at 3pm with Barbara Vann, in the interests of quiring out a space.
Friday I saw Babylon Babylon at the Brick. I was sucked into the World and the action from the first, as (Author, Director, Actor) Jeff Lewonczyk, as "Logios, a storyteller", brought the audience into the world of Babylon, 539 B.C.E. specifically the Temple of Ishtar, on the eve of the Persian attack led by Cyrus, while the 30-person cast entered in opposite parallel directions to so embody the living rivers of the Tigris and Euphrates. I loved the show. It took me somewhere very specific and very alien and also very familiar, dreamlike almost. The cast was excellent, investing the reality with a wonderful and hermetically-sealed verisimilitude of action form and gesture. Hope Cartelli, Michael Criscuolo and Iracel Rivero, Fred Backus and Gyda Arber, Aaron Baker and Adam Swiderski, Ali Skye Bennet, Danny Bowes and Siobhan Doherty, Robert Pinnock and Roger Nasser, Marguerite French, and the afore-mentioned Jeff Lewonczyk particularly impressed. Lights wonderful and appropriate, Set great - simple and grand (The Lion of Babylon painting is a personal favourite...), and the music and dancing were hypnotic and lovely, Grand and Terrible. Jeff's script is a delight, really. The scope, the simplicity, the parallels to people and places and things that we all know in our lives and world are there, as well as having the permission for "Babylonian-licence", as it were, to justify things that we do not have in the everyday all make for an accessible, challengung (in a good way), and fun piece of writing. A treat of an evening.
Saw Kirk Wood Bromley's latest, Me, on Saturday at the Ohio Theatre. The production was excellent, beautifully costumed and lit, with an environment that is beautiful aesthetically, entirely appropriate and right for the material at hand, and ideal for playing in the Ohio's many-pillared space, seating audience within the pillars creating a thrust stage that is at once both vast and intimate. The actors were excellent, with Sarah Malinda Engelke being the obvious stand-out, making the absolute most out of the opportunity of playing a character that is both natural and supernatural, a trickster-spirit with an edge. She leads the way in for the cast, in terms of energy, focus, facility with language and ideas, emotional truth, and playfulness, setting a nice high bar for all. Bob Laine, Josh Hartung, Annie Scott, Drew Cortese, Brenda Withers, Lora Chio, Marshall York, Dan Renkin, Arthur Aulisi, Paula Wilson, and Erwin Thomas all do outstanding work bringing the work to life with ease and authority and pleasure.
And I'm off...
