Guess what, one week from this evening — aka October 4 — a singular sensation for you. Playwright Lee Blessing will be here in town, performing his one-man play Chesapeake himself.
Just in case you haven’t had the pleasure of meeting Lee yet, he has written more than 30 plays, many of them radically different from one another in terms of style and content, including A Walk in the Woods, Cobb, Two Rooms and Eleemosynary. That’s Lee in the photo, on the left, along with partner Melanie Marnich (whose play Tallgrass Gothic you may remember from JAW a few years ago) and Jim Houghton, AD of Signature Theatre Company.
Lee’s in town kicking of Profile Theatre Project’s new season of all Lee, all the time, which starts previews this Wednesday with Great Falls. The Chesapeake presentation will happen on Reed’s campus, where Lee spent his undergrad years. The event’s a partnership between Reed, Profile and the Wordstock Festival, whose multifarious happenings will already be underway as of this Friday.
Now Chesapeake is not an autobiographical account; it takes serious acting chops to pull it off. So you can bet I’m taking advantage of this chance to hear the author read his own work. Full disclosure, though: I’m not just attending for a lark. I’m conducting the Q&A with Lee following his reading. Not to worry, I’ll be a softball prince and avoid questions such as: Is it weird to be married to someone as gorgeous as Melanie?
With St Patrick’s Day around the corner, and potted shamrocks starting to appear in the supermarkets, I’m reminded of something inadvertently shocking my sainted mother told me a while back. Though she was and is in very good health, she mentioned that when she does shed this mortal coil, she’d like her funeral service to conclude with “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling.” And in scouting around YouTube for a suitable rendition (because death is something I’ve been rehearsing since earliest childhood), I was surprised to find that nearly all the uploaded renditions are conducted as though intended to accompany a parade. Slow the song down, however, and it becomes sweetly sad -- a feature of nearly all Irish music, curiously enough.
Try it and you’ll see. The most frenetic of jigs, when subdued, turn mellow and melancholy. Exhibit A: this Meg Christian song, which includes the traditional dance music of Kemp’s Jig, ordinarily performed with a carefree lilt but here turned thoughtful and soulful.
This got me musing on my own demise -- which I will consider untimely though I be older than Methuselah at the time. I hope someone will sing Bob Dylan’s masterpiece, “Mr. Tambourine Man,” for me. It makes a perfect swan song:
Take me disappearing through the smoke rings of my mind Down the foggy ruins of time, far past the frozen leaves The haunted, frightened trees, out to the windy beach Far from the twisted reach of crazy sorrow. Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free Silhouetted by the sea, circled by the circus sands With all memory and fate driven deep beneath the waves Let me forget about today until tomorrow.
Yet so often the song’s performed like a march -- even, on occasion, by Bob himself:
But like Kemp’s Jig, slow it down and you have this aching, mournful and nevertheless sweet version by Melanie (remember Melanie?):
Mr. Dylan may well have written the most Irish song of them all.
O, thank you, St Michael and all your archangels, for getting us at last to the end of the summer TV doldrums. True, I’m grateful to Bravo for tiding us over with Top Chef Masters (which, surprisingly, turned out to be more fun than the regular Top Chef franchise), but otherwise……it’s been a desert of delayed gratification on the smallish screen. New episodes of the formerly de rigueur but now ineffably tedious Entourage don’t cut it; that show jumped the shark years ago.
Yep, the summer drought ends Sunday, when Mad Men returns for season 3, followed in short order by Top Chef Las Vegas, and then Project Runway finally, finally struts its stuff again on August 20.
Big Love, alas, just started filming, so you have to wait till early 2010 for the return of everybody’s most memorable Mormons.
Only through the thoughtful ministrations of my BFF – otherwise known as TIVO – did I get through the dog days. A couple months ago, I awoke one day to discover all 35 episodes of In Treatment singing to me from the TV room. Immediately I started rationing myself, planning my lunchtimes around taking just one session a day with the therapist with feet of clay, Paul Weston, played by Gabriel Byrne.
As absorbing as the first season was, season 2 turned out to be better. Of particular interest to me was the storyline involved Mia, a former patient of Paul’s who return to therapy with some unsettled scores. Hope Davis turned in a profound performance as the rare client who actually gets somewhere during her sessions – eventually – thanks to a quiet and unexpected epiphany. Expect Ms. Davis to get an Emmy for the role, on September 20, for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Dramatic Role. (She’ll compete with Dianne Wiest, also nominated for her role as the therapist’s therapist.)
Cable shows are very well represented this year in the Emmy nominations, and it is no accident that many of them are exceptionally well-written. HBO in particular likes to hire playwrights to write their shows, and the playwriting sensibility is highly evident in their finest series. Sarah Treem, whose play A Feminine Ending did so well at Portland Center Stage a couple of years ago, was a major influence on the first season of In Treatment; her hand was equally evident in season 2, when she was joined by such notable playwrights as Jacquelyn Reingold and Warren Leight. (Jackie wrote the Mia sequence, in fact, and had a cameo role in one episode as half of a squabbling couple.)
Big Love can boast of playwrights Melanie Marnich and Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa; over at Showtime, Rolin Jones puts those wacky pothead on Weeds through their paces; and on network television, Bridget Carpenter writes for the much-lauded yet reportedly underwatched Friday Night Lights. The list goes on and on. Yet all these writers are still penning plays. “I won’t be writing for television forever,” Bridget said awhile back. “I have every intention of keeping my playwriting muscles in shape.”
Thank you for that, St. Michael. But in the interim, the injection of playwriting talent into ailing TV land is welcome indeed.
Just in case you haven’t had the pleasure of meeting Lee yet, he has written more than 30 plays, many of them radically different from one another in terms of style and content, including A Walk in the Woods, Cobb, Two Rooms and Eleemosynary. That’s Lee in the photo, on the left, along with partner Melanie Marnich (whose play Tallgrass Gothic you may remember from JAW a few years ago) and Jim Houghton, AD of Signature Theatre Company.
