The Blouse Method and Travels With Terry
Last night was the inaugural reading in the 10th Season of the Playwrights' Center's General Members Roundtable, which featured an Anjanette Harper double-header: The Blouse Method & Travels With Terry. Anyone who remembers me gushing about Spy Girls knows how I feel about Anjanette, & last night's readings confirmed why she is one of the local playwrights to watch in the coming years.
After being seduced & then abandoned by self-help guru Dudley Blouse, The Blouse Method's Tess Freeborne embarks on an obsessive quest to track him down. She travels with Jack Prophet, a runaway from a reparative therapy retreat. They eventually arrive at the house where Dudley was born - now the Blouse Homestead & Museum - where his assistant/confidante, Elliot (who has never met Blouse but has been through the Method 27 times), conducts tours & hawks memorabilia. The house has been sold, & the new owners don't allow Elliot in the upper levels, so the entire museum is confined to the basement. The only regular visitor is Malcolm, less a Method devotee than a Dairy Queen employee with nothing else to do. While Tess scavenges for clues to Dudley's whereabouts & Elliot struggles to maintain his idol's shining image, Jack and Malcolm unobtrusively make plans to ride off together. And it only takes 65 minutes.
Travels With Terry is a play in real time - 25 minutes long, exactly the length of an installment of the amateur radio show Travels With Terry, broadcast from a basement in rural Minnesota. Gwen, the show's host, inherited the show & its technician, Chad Manning, when she bought the house after the death of its former owner, the eponymous Terry. As a travel show, Travels With Terry is a colossal failure, as her callers never leave the state, let alone the country. Their very special guest this week is Barrett Brandon, author of several books about rugged adventuring in Central and Southeast Asia. His early works were best-sellers, but his star has dimmed due to changing tourist fads, & he takes his arrival in Gwen's basement as "the sign I've been waiting for. I'm done. Finished." But as Barrett eats 7-layer bars & listens to calls from such exotic locales as Duluth & Rochester, he begins to think a quiet rural life is exactly what he needs - just as Gwen latches onto him as her ticket out of the basement.
Anjanette's greatest gift is what is said by being left unsaid. Jack mentions that his sister forced him onto his 'retreat,' & we know exactly what kind of retreat it was. Gwen tells the sad story of Terry's demise by saying, "She fell off a water tower. She used to do this segment called 'Bird's Eye View...'" Someday, some theater is going to stage these works of hers, & all us little PWC people are going to be busting down the door to get in.
Anjanette put these plays together not because of thematic compatibility, but because she's entranced by a quiet despair that envelops people who live & work in basements. Which made me realize how much time I've spent in basements. My childhood basement was my playroom and the home of my rabbit, April. Mindy's parties wound up in the basement, & Dad spent much of my youth working in a basement. The basement was the testing grounds of the Anne Boleyn, the catapult Dad & I built for 7th grade Science Olympiad, using 4 pieces of wood, a ruler, 2 springs, & a green plastic ice cream scoop. The Queer Union office, where I whiled away many pleasant hours & accidentally came out to my uncle & his girlfriend, was in a basement; as was the Banshee spray adhesive debacle. My first off-campus apartment was in a basement. So was the only job I've been fired from. The Roundtable itself is in a basement. And there's FUNC (nee Fight Club), formerly held in gunn's basement, home of much camaraderie, alcohol, & art. And yet I don't feel despair, quiet or otherwise. I don't feel my subterranean existence has done me irreparable damage. Has it?
How about you? What is your basement tale? What's happened to you underground?
After being seduced & then abandoned by self-help guru Dudley Blouse, The Blouse Method's Tess Freeborne embarks on an obsessive quest to track him down. She travels with Jack Prophet, a runaway from a reparative therapy retreat. They eventually arrive at the house where Dudley was born - now the Blouse Homestead & Museum - where his assistant/confidante, Elliot (who has never met Blouse but has been through the Method 27 times), conducts tours & hawks memorabilia. The house has been sold, & the new owners don't allow Elliot in the upper levels, so the entire museum is confined to the basement. The only regular visitor is Malcolm, less a Method devotee than a Dairy Queen employee with nothing else to do. While Tess scavenges for clues to Dudley's whereabouts & Elliot struggles to maintain his idol's shining image, Jack and Malcolm unobtrusively make plans to ride off together. And it only takes 65 minutes.
Travels With Terry is a play in real time - 25 minutes long, exactly the length of an installment of the amateur radio show Travels With Terry, broadcast from a basement in rural Minnesota. Gwen, the show's host, inherited the show & its technician, Chad Manning, when she bought the house after the death of its former owner, the eponymous Terry. As a travel show, Travels With Terry is a colossal failure, as her callers never leave the state, let alone the country. Their very special guest this week is Barrett Brandon, author of several books about rugged adventuring in Central and Southeast Asia. His early works were best-sellers, but his star has dimmed due to changing tourist fads, & he takes his arrival in Gwen's basement as "the sign I've been waiting for. I'm done. Finished." But as Barrett eats 7-layer bars & listens to calls from such exotic locales as Duluth & Rochester, he begins to think a quiet rural life is exactly what he needs - just as Gwen latches onto him as her ticket out of the basement.
Anjanette's greatest gift is what is said by being left unsaid. Jack mentions that his sister forced him onto his 'retreat,' & we know exactly what kind of retreat it was. Gwen tells the sad story of Terry's demise by saying, "She fell off a water tower. She used to do this segment called 'Bird's Eye View...'" Someday, some theater is going to stage these works of hers, & all us little PWC people are going to be busting down the door to get in.
Anjanette put these plays together not because of thematic compatibility, but because she's entranced by a quiet despair that envelops people who live & work in basements. Which made me realize how much time I've spent in basements. My childhood basement was my playroom and the home of my rabbit, April. Mindy's parties wound up in the basement, & Dad spent much of my youth working in a basement. The basement was the testing grounds of the Anne Boleyn, the catapult Dad & I built for 7th grade Science Olympiad, using 4 pieces of wood, a ruler, 2 springs, & a green plastic ice cream scoop. The Queer Union office, where I whiled away many pleasant hours & accidentally came out to my uncle & his girlfriend, was in a basement; as was the Banshee spray adhesive debacle. My first off-campus apartment was in a basement. So was the only job I've been fired from. The Roundtable itself is in a basement. And there's FUNC (nee Fight Club), formerly held in gunn's basement, home of much camaraderie, alcohol, & art. And yet I don't feel despair, quiet or otherwise. I don't feel my subterranean existence has done me irreparable damage. Has it?
How about you? What is your basement tale? What's happened to you underground?