Fan mail from some flounder?

Not from a flounder at all, actually — whatever that even means — but one of my most devoted blog-readers. Still I couldn’t resist tarting up this post by using the phrase. Know where it comes from? Here’s a clue.

Anyway. Today I did get fan mail of a sort, clearly intended to be sung to the tune of "Norwegian Wood." I suppose it’s more epitaph than epigram, but I’m taking a compliment where I can find it, okay? Here’s what I got:

Onnnnce
you had a blog
or should I say, once it had you.

Yoooooour
friends from the bog
often stopped by,
commented too.

I think you were coping with bosses you wished you could roast.
You work for yourself now and never have time left to post.

Now nobody reads
new posts from Mead
this bird is freed.

la,
la la la la
la la la la
la la la la.

In case you’d like to sing along, here’s something Fabulicious for your edification…



…along with my promise (yet again and not for the last time) to post more soon.

Coming attractions: Charise Castro Smith

Charise Castro Smith’s amazing new play BoomCrackleFly opens tomorrow at Miracle Theater Group — and what an opening it will be. Ms. Smith’s here in town for occasion, and she was able to answer a few questions between rehearsals.

.....................

SO. First off: I love your script, and I love the wild, reckless sensibility that informs it. It’s going to be amazing to see how Miracle manages to stage it – people bobbing in a world covered with water, for instance. Would you say you believe your first responsibility, as a writer, is to your poetic vision, without regard to staging concerns? And that it’s up to the director to figure out how to realize that vision?

This is one of the first questions people usually ask after reading this play — how do you think they will stage the magical huge stuff? I think one of the great things about theater is the fact that if an actor stands on stage and says something is true, then at that moment it's true. It's the huge imaginative possibility of theater to call all sorts of things into being with language. If you think about some of the things that happen in Shakespeare's plays: forests moving from one place to another, ghosts, battles, tempests...I just try to listen to the characters as I'm writing and trust that the actor's and director will make it happen. And I think that Olga and the actors at Milagro are doing a really amazing job of just that.

Your work holds all kinds of contradictions in suspension; it’s hallucinatory, yet also tremendously vivid. Who would you say are your literary influences?

I've been a lifelong serious reader of just about anything I could get my hands on. One first aha moments with a play was sitting on the floor of the public library when I was thirteen or so and reading Jose Rivera's Marisol and just watching this whole new world open up in front of me. Then about a year later I read Angels in America and was totally blown away too. With Boomcracklefly I sort of had Thornton Wilder's The Skin of our Teeth bouncing around in my mind. It's one of my favorite plays.

Hemingway appears in this play – is he an influence? Why does he appear in the play to the two sisters? Why Hemingway, I mean, and not Dante or Kushner or Sappho?

I grew up in Miami, and my family and I would sometimes drive down to Key West for the weekend. There's a whole culture of street performers there -- jugglers and clowns and people who get together and put on little shows by the water at sunset every night. So I think that's were the acrobat sisters came from. And then Hemingway is also such a huge figure in Key West. The house he lived in there is a museum now- and there's this little studio in the back where he had his office and wrote. He's sort of a local celebrity there. He's also interesting to me because he's such a big historical macho man and yet he writes some of his female characters with such tenderness. Catherine in A Farewell to Arms just breaks my heart.

What are you working on now?

I'm working on a couple of different plays right now. One is about the life and adventures of a little girl spy during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Another is about the last couple months of Queen Isabella's life. And also writing a couple of other shorter plays and some cool projects as an actor in New York.

Thanks for the memories

Slouching toward spring in Portlandia

Just 28 hours to go till the equinox, at this writing — but hey, who’s counting. It's been spring here for weeks, as evidenced by the number of trees in my neighborhood that are now completely swathed in neon green moss.

By way of celebrating the changing tides of the seasons, here is a poem by Portland icon Susan Denning — she of the tremendously useful resource for writers called Paper Fort, as well as the online literary magazine, Caffeine Destiny.

For more of Susan’s work, visit her page at Inknode. And celebrate the return of light with us.



NO ONE KNOWS HER

Tell her wait, little interrupter. Why bother
she is slow. She is field hungry, moving
to the edge of the garden, where she wants
to stay and stay. Spring on its way, why listen.
She is solidly hers. Ducks overhead and the sky
a speckled target. A suggestion of owls in the trees.
The trees repeat her name. How the trees insist.
The birdbath unfreezes, the ground sprouts
and shifts. Tell her back to the house with its curtains
and floors. Tell her dress the paper dolls in leaves,
give them paper knives and forks. Stand them on the counter.
Tell her lovely, little negotiator. She would rather gather
mice. She has had it with the roses. How the bugs persist.
Tell her she can wish for goats eating up the weeds—
she can hope for rabbits. Deer lingering by the fence.
She wants her animals near. She wants the only sound
to be their movements. Call her steady. Tell her resist.

Beannachtaí na Féile Pádraig

Not to worry, I will have new posts (real ones) soon. Meanwhile, in honor of St Patrick's Day, I offer what is probably the very worst "Irish" song of all time.



Just to be clear, by the way, these jokers are not actually The Irish Rovers.

Cheers!

Epistolary romances: a pre-Valentine’s story

James and I have been together over 20 years now. And during those decades, many minor but ongoing disagreements have come to the fore. The most frequently repeated is probably about career. James will be able to retire one day – a concept all but unheard of in the theater profession. When I bemoan my fate, he says, “But you’ve spent your life doing work you love.” To which I can only say: “Yes, but YOU have the option of retiring from your work when you feel like it!”

Other oft-iterated arguments: whether you should dust before you vacuum or after (I maintain it’s the latter), and whether hotel tips should be delivered at the end of a stay or doled out in miniature every day (the former, according to me).


But here at the Colorado New Play Summit, come to find out James was right all along about the tipping. This came to the fore because on my first day, I left a note in my hotel room alerting housekeeping that the TV wasn’t working, along with a small tip for the trouble. When I returned to my room that evening, the TV worked perfectly and on top of it was the note at right. Sweet!

The next day I left a thank you note with another tip, and came “home” – after trudging through 10 blocks of fallen snow while the white stuff continued to sift down from the heavens -- to a note that read: “Something for a cold day!” It sat atop a packet of instant hot chocolate mix. And then yesterday, another note expressing the hope that my stay in Denver was going well.

Today, I was just a little disappointed to get no note. But then I noticed a brown envelope on my desk, which turned out to contain a chocolate chip cookie. And in the fridge: two small cartons of milk, probably pilfered from the hotel larder. Sweet and sweeter.

Do you think I should try gradually increasing the size of the tips to see what happens? I think I should we (my interlocutor and I) should go for the gold, don’t you?

New play fever at one mile high

“Beautiful people of Denver,” as the Unsinkable Molly Brown (whose Queen Anne mansion is within walking distance of the Denver Center for the Performing Arts) once warbled. Loving it here! The sharply arctic air (a blizzard dumped snow all over the place on Monday night), the gleaming modernist buildings cheek by jowl with sandstone structures dating back to the 19th century – and yes, the theater. I’m in town all week to work at the Colorado New Play Summit, as dramaturg on The Whale, a new play by Samuel D. Hunter, directed by Chay Yew.

It’s a dazzling stellium of new work: two world premieres productions, by Michelle Lowe and Ken Weitzman, and five readings (by Octavio Solis, Lisa Loomer and Lloyd Suh in addition to Sam, plus a devised piece by Buntport. And coterminous activities, and an upcoming industry weekend of theater luminaries from across the country.

More about that on another day. Meanwhile, today was Day 3 of our rehearsal process with The Whale – a real breakthrough, too, that left me too moved to speak for a few minutes afterward. Here I am in a more pacific moment, allegedly explaining what dramaturgy’s all about:




I don’t think I’ve ever answered that question the same way twice.

More cogently, here is Sam explaining how The Whale made it way to Denver:



Stay tuned for excessive name-dropping, gossip and insider information.