Catch-up: three songs, three plays, a handful of dreams, a link, and some soup.
A simple formula describes what it takes to get me to like a song: male tenor + acoustic guitar + minor chords. Bonus points for hand percussion and depressing lyrics. These aren't the only kinds of songs I like, but that formula is close to a guarantee. (Exceptions for Jack Johnson and John Mayer. *shudder*)
You get these because they're the only ones I have on hand at the moment:
Neighbour Boy by Janove Ottesen (alb. Francis' Lonely Nights), a Norwegian rocker-turned-singer-songwriter who wryly described this song as "fake bluegrass" because his mother didn't play guitar. I love this song so much -- the harmony in the second verse especially, the banjo, and the hints of flute at the end.
Eli the Barrow Boy by The Decemberists (alb. Picaresque). If you don't know this already, The Decemberists are fantastic. Most of their stuff is much peppier than this, if not any more uplifting, and it's all very intelligent (Stephen Colbert once described their music as "hyperliterate prog rock"). Colin Meloy's voice is unique and endearing, though it may be an acquired taste.
John Wayne Gacy, Jr. by Sufjan Stevens (alb. Illinoise). Never was there a prettier song about a serial killer.
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Mm. Homemade potato leek soup.
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Dreamt all sorts of LJ-filled dreams last night, the sort of half-sleep where you seem to wake after every REM cycle through the night thinking you're doing something that absolutely needs to get done. The first few involved beta-ing "Aftershocks" epilogue chapters with nightdog_barks and crew; then in a later one, the House con was going on, and daasgrrl and pwcorgigirl and I were hanging out at my "grandparents' house," which we were using as home base for the duration. A cow wandered in from the backyard, and I step-danced while holding its front hooves.
Hey, better that than last week, when my unconscious thought it'd be a lark to play movies in my head about my friend A. getting into a fatal car crash with her mother so horrific that when her father called to tell us about it, he told us not to eat anything before we came over because we'd throw up when we saw the photographs; and about Rodney hiding from zombie apocalypses (that one, at least, was explainable by a throwaway reference in one of the recent Nantucket 'verse fics); and about Sylvester Stallone getting most of the skin of his face and hands torn off by a guy wielding some kind of mace, and then taking his horribly mangled hands with the weapons still embedded in them and scraping them down the other guy's face despite the pain... But also there was one where a very masculine and reclining Al Pacino reeled me in for a kiss, so I guess it wasn't all bad.
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kassrachel has a beautiful post on fannish textual engagement as modern midrash.
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There are a lot of posts and story ideas swirling around in my head, and WsIP to finish, but still the brain-keyboard block to deal with. Let's try a couple of play reviews.
Humans Anonymous, by Kate Hewlett, dir. Robin A. Paterson
The ads proclaimed that the play had been named "Best of TORONTO FRINGE 2006," but perhaps only one of the seven NY/NJ fangirls who trekked to the tiny theater on the 12th floor of a building on W. 54th St. Friday night attended for a reason other than that Kate Hewlett -- sister of David "Rodney McKay" Hewlett -- wrote and was acting in it. My expectations, at least, weren't high except for the anticipated thrill of seeing Kate right there in front of us. The venue wasn't too promising: acting students bustled through the hallways preparing for auditions, we took up about a sixth of the seats inside, and the small space was reminiscent of a lot of the college plays I used to go to.
But it turned out to be a fantastic play! Not just because I wasn't expecting much, and not just because I wanted to like it because Kate Hewlett had done it. It was genuinely clever, solidly written, consistently funny, sad (it's aptly described as a "heartbreaking comedy") and accessible, with a talented cast playing five well-realized and sympathetic 20- to 30-somethings, and engaging themes of exploring (or failing to explore) one's sexual identity, facing personal and universal fears, and the willingness to recover from heartbreak. None of the painfully bad acting or writing I'd been braced for; no awkward audience nervousness that the actors would flub their lines. It's a shame the play wasn't in a larger space with better publicized ads; it would have done well, I think.
The main character was Ellen (Esther Barlow), an uptight ad exec who haunts online dating sites but never goes on second dates with any matches because she's afraid to commit to anyone even 12 years after finding the love of her life in bed with another woman. At the beginning of the play, she goes on a date with Jenny (Jennifer Laine Williams), who accidentally misspelled her name "Lenny" on one of those websites. Ellen kindly rejects her because she doesn't date women, and Jenny spends the rest of the play sending Ellen anonymous gifts (signed simply, "A.") both to cheer her up and in the hope that one day Ellen will change her mind and fall in love with the mysterious gift-giver and Jenny could reveal herself.
Of course, it all goes horribly wrong.
Kate Hewlett and Philip Graeme played English siblings Gema (that's hard-"g" "GEE-ma") and Peter Shaw. Gema sounded like Emma Thompson and acted like Thompson's Trelawney, armed with galoshes, an overwhelming personality, manic energy, and a cat that moo'd like a cow. Peter was Ellen's wry, well-meaning, meddlesome friend and employee, whose oft-mentioned boyfriend (also Peter) and father both remained offstage the entire time. The source of most of the hilarious lines in the play (and vaguely reminiscent of Jack Davenport), he served as Jenny's secret delivery boy as he tried to convince Ellen to give her a chance.
An uncredited actor played a stuttering, shy, clumsy young man who runs into Ellen twice before she mistakes him for her anonymous admirer because his name starts with "A." She declares her love for him right in front of Jenny, but it turns out he's engaged to Gema, and that's when everything falls apart. Eventually, Ellen makes her peace with a devastated Jenny, but Ellen still doesn't want to date her, and they agree not to meet again.
The long and shallow stage was arranged with a series of screens facing the audience, separating the coffee shop on stage right where Jenny sets up shop and Ellen and Peter's offices on stage left. In between scenes, the characters would step up, face the audience, and read some of their worst fears from lists they'd prepared, ranging from falling in love again and not falling in love again (Ellen) to "singing in the shower and having someone in the next apartment record you and sell it on eBay" (Jenny) to public speaking (A.) to "having a man dressed up as his mother stab you in the shower" (Gema). By the end, all of them rallied together and sang softly (overcoming their first fear: singing in public), and Ellen wrote a thank-you letter to Jenny and said she was ready to look for someone again.
All in all, a really great time.
Also, we had the lovely opportunity to meet Kate for a few minutes after the show, and she is just as adorable, charismatic, happy and naturally pretty in person as she is on TV and in photos.
ETA: wraithfodder's review, with photo (sandwiched in the middle of the description of her daytrip to NYC)
Cry Havoc, by Tom Coash
This one had great potential but went off the deep end. The premise is that an Englishman, Nicholas (Keith Merrill), vows to get his young Egyptian lover, Mohammed (Sameer Sheik), out of Egypt and safely into England after Mohammed is kidnapped and tortured over several days by the Cairo police. The eventual explanation for the abduction is that Mohammed was placed on a blacklist after publishing political cartoons at university and can be arrested at any time on the government's whim. Aside from a few scenes at the British embassy with employee Ms. Nevers (a scene-stealing and somewhat demonic Pamela Paul), all of the action occurs in Mohammed's apartment after his incarceration, with Merrill and Sheik the only actors.
The first act features an injured, shaken and fearful Mohammed, initially wearing only a pair of boxer shorts, allowing Nicholas to nurse him back to health as well as talk him into seeking an exit visa while Nicholas applies to the embassy for an entrance visa. In the second act, Mohammed makes up his mind to stay and fight rather than flee to live with Nicholas in England as a kept boy, shunned by the white Christians around him, turning his head from his people's suppression, and it is Nicholas who finds himself powerless in the face of Mohammed's convictions, pleading, stripped naked. Literally. For several minutes. And it wasn't sexy.
It sounds good on paper, but Merrill couldn't act for crap, and it hurt to watch, especially opposite the very talented (and very pretty!) Sheik, whose voice, body language and dark eyes conveyed a myriad of deep emotions. It was impossible to tell how much of Nicholas' repression and condescension was part of the character and how much was Merrill's inability to be convincing or sympathetic; by the end, I was so sick of him that I didn't want Mohammed to go back with him to England at all, regardless of Mohammed's reasons for staying in Cairo. When they cuddled and touched each other, I believed that Mohammed felt affection for Nicholas, but wavered on Nicholas' feelings for Mohammed. Nicholas was supposed to be a translator of love poetry, but he didn't seem to have any idea what love is or how to express it; in her big monologue on the dangers of love, Ms. Nevers proves clearly that she's thought more about the subject than he has. At least in the second act Mohammed called him on that fact.
The other major flaw was the shift in the second act from two characters struggling to stay together and even to continue understanding each other after this trauma and in the face of very real dangers, to two stereotypes representing Colonial England/All-Powerful Hedonist West and Terrorist/Religious Fanatic Arab. As Nicholas and Mohammed struggle to solve the problem before them -- namely, whether and how to get Mohammed out of Egypt so he doesn't get arrested again and killed -- various cultural, personal, religious and economic assumptions, prejudices and inequalities surface between them until it's clear they can't be together anymore. It worked for a while -- the second act addressed troubling undertones in the first, such as Nicholas' pet name for Mohammed, "little one," along with England's history of dominating Egypt and Nicholas' view of Egypt as a backward "third world" country -- but by the end, it had turned ludicrous, with Mohammed waving a gun at a butt-naked Nicholas while demanding money to fund bomb acquisition. There were also the ridiculous and uncomfortable embassy scenes in which Ms. Nevers coerced Nicholas into removing various items of clothing as she grilled him on his reasons for wanting to get Mohammed out of the country, they engaged in philosophical debates on the nature of love, and she urged him to tell him about things like how he lost his homosexual virginity and why he came to Egypt (he was chasing after an elusive something that had once made his stern father smile). The play still could have been saved if it had ended with Nicholas laying money and the visa on Mohammed's pillow, placing his hand on one of the bloody handprints on the wall that had been referenced several times as meaning good luck, and walking out of the apartment, but instead, once he had gone, Mohammed reappeared in a robe and narrated the future, wherein he and his friends blow up a truck and he rises to heaven burned to a crisp.
Well. It had its moments. There were some funny lines. I liked the hurt/comfort of the beginning, with Mohammed's tender injuries and Nicholas taking care of him, watching over him in the night, letting Mohammed pillow his head in his lap. I liked Mohammed's post-traumatic depression. I liked Nicholas' inability to understand Mohammed's desire not to turn his head at the mistreatment of his neighbors or the false democracy of his increasingly abusive government. I liked the idea that Mohammed wanted to stay in Egypt and shut up about what happened to him because he wanted to protect his family. I liked the idea -- and was sorry it wasn't handled well -- that Nicholas translated love poems for a living and really couldn't apply them to his own life.
And did I mention Mohammed was pretty? All bruised and burned and limping, having nightmares, recounting his experiences at the hands of brutal guards, breaking down while performing his daily prayers, reminiscing about the night he spent at a gay bar in London as a teenager, and then all but burning with determination once he made up his mind, and his final haunting breath as he died.... Yes.
I was going to recommend this one to maddy_harrigan (the playwright is from New Haven) and catilinarian for the political conflict and tense, gay love story, but having seen it... Well, forewarned is forearmed, as they say, so if it's still playing when you make it over here, maybe you'll want to give it a try yourselves. Or not.
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There was also Aaron Sorkin's The Farnsworth Invention last Saturday, but I'm reviewed-out for the moment and need to get back to work, so I'll just say it's worth a go, and the actor who plays Farnsworth is better than Hank Azaria (NBC/RCA president David Sarnoff), IMO, though Azaria's very good, and it's an interesting study in ferreting out the truth of history -- even recent history -- when you can't trust any of its narrators and some scenes are followed by declarations that none of the previous had actually happened.
--------------
And can I just say, in anticipation of a What I Am Thankful For post, that I am so grateful to have LJ-turning-RL friends to go to these events with and squee and discuss and eat delicious food. ♥
You get these because they're the only ones I have on hand at the moment:
Neighbour Boy by Janove Ottesen (alb. Francis' Lonely Nights), a Norwegian rocker-turned-singer-songwriter who wryly described this song as "fake bluegrass" because his mother didn't play guitar. I love this song so much -- the harmony in the second verse especially, the banjo, and the hints of flute at the end.
Eli the Barrow Boy by The Decemberists (alb. Picaresque). If you don't know this already, The Decemberists are fantastic. Most of their stuff is much peppier than this, if not any more uplifting, and it's all very intelligent (Stephen Colbert once described their music as "hyperliterate prog rock"). Colin Meloy's voice is unique and endearing, though it may be an acquired taste.
John Wayne Gacy, Jr. by Sufjan Stevens (alb. Illinoise). Never was there a prettier song about a serial killer.
----------------
Mm. Homemade potato leek soup.
----------------
Dreamt all sorts of LJ-filled dreams last night, the sort of half-sleep where you seem to wake after every REM cycle through the night thinking you're doing something that absolutely needs to get done. The first few involved beta-ing "Aftershocks" epilogue chapters with nightdog_barks and crew; then in a later one, the House con was going on, and daasgrrl and pwcorgigirl and I were hanging out at my "grandparents' house," which we were using as home base for the duration. A cow wandered in from the backyard, and I step-danced while holding its front hooves.
Hey, better that than last week, when my unconscious thought it'd be a lark to play movies in my head about my friend A. getting into a fatal car crash with her mother so horrific that when her father called to tell us about it, he told us not to eat anything before we came over because we'd throw up when we saw the photographs; and about Rodney hiding from zombie apocalypses (that one, at least, was explainable by a throwaway reference in one of the recent Nantucket 'verse fics); and about Sylvester Stallone getting most of the skin of his face and hands torn off by a guy wielding some kind of mace, and then taking his horribly mangled hands with the weapons still embedded in them and scraping them down the other guy's face despite the pain... But also there was one where a very masculine and reclining Al Pacino reeled me in for a kiss, so I guess it wasn't all bad.
----------------
kassrachel has a beautiful post on fannish textual engagement as modern midrash.
----------------
There are a lot of posts and story ideas swirling around in my head, and WsIP to finish, but still the brain-keyboard block to deal with. Let's try a couple of play reviews.
Humans Anonymous, by Kate Hewlett, dir. Robin A. Paterson
The ads proclaimed that the play had been named "Best of TORONTO FRINGE 2006," but perhaps only one of the seven NY/NJ fangirls who trekked to the tiny theater on the 12th floor of a building on W. 54th St. Friday night attended for a reason other than that Kate Hewlett -- sister of David "Rodney McKay" Hewlett -- wrote and was acting in it. My expectations, at least, weren't high except for the anticipated thrill of seeing Kate right there in front of us. The venue wasn't too promising: acting students bustled through the hallways preparing for auditions, we took up about a sixth of the seats inside, and the small space was reminiscent of a lot of the college plays I used to go to.
But it turned out to be a fantastic play! Not just because I wasn't expecting much, and not just because I wanted to like it because Kate Hewlett had done it. It was genuinely clever, solidly written, consistently funny, sad (it's aptly described as a "heartbreaking comedy") and accessible, with a talented cast playing five well-realized and sympathetic 20- to 30-somethings, and engaging themes of exploring (or failing to explore) one's sexual identity, facing personal and universal fears, and the willingness to recover from heartbreak. None of the painfully bad acting or writing I'd been braced for; no awkward audience nervousness that the actors would flub their lines. It's a shame the play wasn't in a larger space with better publicized ads; it would have done well, I think.
The main character was Ellen (Esther Barlow), an uptight ad exec who haunts online dating sites but never goes on second dates with any matches because she's afraid to commit to anyone even 12 years after finding the love of her life in bed with another woman. At the beginning of the play, she goes on a date with Jenny (Jennifer Laine Williams), who accidentally misspelled her name "Lenny" on one of those websites. Ellen kindly rejects her because she doesn't date women, and Jenny spends the rest of the play sending Ellen anonymous gifts (signed simply, "A.") both to cheer her up and in the hope that one day Ellen will change her mind and fall in love with the mysterious gift-giver and Jenny could reveal herself.
Of course, it all goes horribly wrong.
Kate Hewlett and Philip Graeme played English siblings Gema (that's hard-"g" "GEE-ma") and Peter Shaw. Gema sounded like Emma Thompson and acted like Thompson's Trelawney, armed with galoshes, an overwhelming personality, manic energy, and a cat that moo'd like a cow. Peter was Ellen's wry, well-meaning, meddlesome friend and employee, whose oft-mentioned boyfriend (also Peter) and father both remained offstage the entire time. The source of most of the hilarious lines in the play (and vaguely reminiscent of Jack Davenport), he served as Jenny's secret delivery boy as he tried to convince Ellen to give her a chance.
An uncredited actor played a stuttering, shy, clumsy young man who runs into Ellen twice before she mistakes him for her anonymous admirer because his name starts with "A." She declares her love for him right in front of Jenny, but it turns out he's engaged to Gema, and that's when everything falls apart. Eventually, Ellen makes her peace with a devastated Jenny, but Ellen still doesn't want to date her, and they agree not to meet again.
The long and shallow stage was arranged with a series of screens facing the audience, separating the coffee shop on stage right where Jenny sets up shop and Ellen and Peter's offices on stage left. In between scenes, the characters would step up, face the audience, and read some of their worst fears from lists they'd prepared, ranging from falling in love again and not falling in love again (Ellen) to "singing in the shower and having someone in the next apartment record you and sell it on eBay" (Jenny) to public speaking (A.) to "having a man dressed up as his mother stab you in the shower" (Gema). By the end, all of them rallied together and sang softly (overcoming their first fear: singing in public), and Ellen wrote a thank-you letter to Jenny and said she was ready to look for someone again.
All in all, a really great time.
Also, we had the lovely opportunity to meet Kate for a few minutes after the show, and she is just as adorable, charismatic, happy and naturally pretty in person as she is on TV and in photos.
ETA: wraithfodder's review, with photo (sandwiched in the middle of the description of her daytrip to NYC)
Cry Havoc, by Tom Coash
This one had great potential but went off the deep end. The premise is that an Englishman, Nicholas (Keith Merrill), vows to get his young Egyptian lover, Mohammed (Sameer Sheik), out of Egypt and safely into England after Mohammed is kidnapped and tortured over several days by the Cairo police. The eventual explanation for the abduction is that Mohammed was placed on a blacklist after publishing political cartoons at university and can be arrested at any time on the government's whim. Aside from a few scenes at the British embassy with employee Ms. Nevers (a scene-stealing and somewhat demonic Pamela Paul), all of the action occurs in Mohammed's apartment after his incarceration, with Merrill and Sheik the only actors.
The first act features an injured, shaken and fearful Mohammed, initially wearing only a pair of boxer shorts, allowing Nicholas to nurse him back to health as well as talk him into seeking an exit visa while Nicholas applies to the embassy for an entrance visa. In the second act, Mohammed makes up his mind to stay and fight rather than flee to live with Nicholas in England as a kept boy, shunned by the white Christians around him, turning his head from his people's suppression, and it is Nicholas who finds himself powerless in the face of Mohammed's convictions, pleading, stripped naked. Literally. For several minutes. And it wasn't sexy.
It sounds good on paper, but Merrill couldn't act for crap, and it hurt to watch, especially opposite the very talented (and very pretty!) Sheik, whose voice, body language and dark eyes conveyed a myriad of deep emotions. It was impossible to tell how much of Nicholas' repression and condescension was part of the character and how much was Merrill's inability to be convincing or sympathetic; by the end, I was so sick of him that I didn't want Mohammed to go back with him to England at all, regardless of Mohammed's reasons for staying in Cairo. When they cuddled and touched each other, I believed that Mohammed felt affection for Nicholas, but wavered on Nicholas' feelings for Mohammed. Nicholas was supposed to be a translator of love poetry, but he didn't seem to have any idea what love is or how to express it; in her big monologue on the dangers of love, Ms. Nevers proves clearly that she's thought more about the subject than he has. At least in the second act Mohammed called him on that fact.
The other major flaw was the shift in the second act from two characters struggling to stay together and even to continue understanding each other after this trauma and in the face of very real dangers, to two stereotypes representing Colonial England/All-Powerful Hedonist West and Terrorist/Religious Fanatic Arab. As Nicholas and Mohammed struggle to solve the problem before them -- namely, whether and how to get Mohammed out of Egypt so he doesn't get arrested again and killed -- various cultural, personal, religious and economic assumptions, prejudices and inequalities surface between them until it's clear they can't be together anymore. It worked for a while -- the second act addressed troubling undertones in the first, such as Nicholas' pet name for Mohammed, "little one," along with England's history of dominating Egypt and Nicholas' view of Egypt as a backward "third world" country -- but by the end, it had turned ludicrous, with Mohammed waving a gun at a butt-naked Nicholas while demanding money to fund bomb acquisition. There were also the ridiculous and uncomfortable embassy scenes in which Ms. Nevers coerced Nicholas into removing various items of clothing as she grilled him on his reasons for wanting to get Mohammed out of the country, they engaged in philosophical debates on the nature of love, and she urged him to tell him about things like how he lost his homosexual virginity and why he came to Egypt (he was chasing after an elusive something that had once made his stern father smile). The play still could have been saved if it had ended with Nicholas laying money and the visa on Mohammed's pillow, placing his hand on one of the bloody handprints on the wall that had been referenced several times as meaning good luck, and walking out of the apartment, but instead, once he had gone, Mohammed reappeared in a robe and narrated the future, wherein he and his friends blow up a truck and he rises to heaven burned to a crisp.
Well. It had its moments. There were some funny lines. I liked the hurt/comfort of the beginning, with Mohammed's tender injuries and Nicholas taking care of him, watching over him in the night, letting Mohammed pillow his head in his lap. I liked Mohammed's post-traumatic depression. I liked Nicholas' inability to understand Mohammed's desire not to turn his head at the mistreatment of his neighbors or the false democracy of his increasingly abusive government. I liked the idea that Mohammed wanted to stay in Egypt and shut up about what happened to him because he wanted to protect his family. I liked the idea -- and was sorry it wasn't handled well -- that Nicholas translated love poems for a living and really couldn't apply them to his own life.
And did I mention Mohammed was pretty? All bruised and burned and limping, having nightmares, recounting his experiences at the hands of brutal guards, breaking down while performing his daily prayers, reminiscing about the night he spent at a gay bar in London as a teenager, and then all but burning with determination once he made up his mind, and his final haunting breath as he died.... Yes.
I was going to recommend this one to maddy_harrigan (the playwright is from New Haven) and catilinarian for the political conflict and tense, gay love story, but having seen it... Well, forewarned is forearmed, as they say, so if it's still playing when you make it over here, maybe you'll want to give it a try yourselves. Or not.
--------------
There was also Aaron Sorkin's The Farnsworth Invention last Saturday, but I'm reviewed-out for the moment and need to get back to work, so I'll just say it's worth a go, and the actor who plays Farnsworth is better than Hank Azaria (NBC/RCA president David Sarnoff), IMO, though Azaria's very good, and it's an interesting study in ferreting out the truth of history -- even recent history -- when you can't trust any of its narrators and some scenes are followed by declarations that none of the previous had actually happened.
--------------
And can I just say, in anticipation of a What I Am Thankful For post, that I am so grateful to have LJ-turning-RL friends to go to these events with and squee and discuss and eat delicious food. ♥