One Week In.

From an acceptance letter to a production gathering steam in a mere week. And yet, the road ahead is long (no it’s not—I constantly worry whether we’ll have enough time to pull this off) and full of obstacles—expected ones, as well as the unforeseeable (those delightful little “unknown unknowns,” to use Rumsfeld-speak, that keep me up at night or catch me off-guard while riding the train in a sea of brusque commuters). After sustaining a financial freakout on Wednesday—when I pulled clumps of my flowing locks from my head as I reeled at the discrepancy between the estimated costs and my personal assets—I recovered and sent my acceptance package to Manhattan Rep: a security deposit, and playwright release form.

Side note: On the matter of copy righting one’s script, it is a known fact that one may establish a dated seal of authenticity upon one’s intellectual property merely by sending the item to oneself through the U.S. Mail in a sealed envelope forever to remain unopened. (There’s something very Dada about all of this. That people must trust that’s your script in there without actually knowing. They just have to take your word on it; some kind of bizarre faith or honour code or something. But it could really just be a bunch of shredded Chinese newspapers, or takeout menus, or some really awful poetry for all anyone knows. One could mail oneself dozens of “scripts” and claim to have written dozens of plays. You can trust me, though. I mean, would I go through all this trouble for a fake play just to get your attention and respect? Haha, yeah, just tell everyone I wrote a script, and that’s it's going to be produced … and make it all seem very real on my blog, but, little would everyone know, that it’s actually a well-thought out and orchestrated hoax? Hahahaha. I mean, where would I even have access to Chinese newspapers? Or takeout menus? Or … bad poetry … Trust me. This is all real.) So, being a playwright with an original script on its way toward production, I felt it necessary and proper to establish a claim to my work. So, in a US Mail ReadyPost envelope I mailed a copy of my script (really, it’s in there) to myself. Two days later, I found it crammed in my mailbox. Sweet. I promptly took it upstairs and announced to Tim that my little plan had worked. The play then sat on my desk for the rest of the night. Well, that is until I took a closer look at it. I looked at the upper right-hand corner—at the four oversized stamps of a turn-o-the-century baseball player--$1.68. And only then I noticed that precisely what I had desired, the stamp from the routing postal facility through which this envelope passed on its journey from Manhattan, NY to Jersey City, NJ—from me to myself—the time and date stamp which would “firmly” establish that my script existed in this form at this moment--that I claim it as my original idea—was completely and utterly absent. Perplexed, I turned it over and searched the back of the envelope. Blank. “Tear here to open.” Do not tear to open. But wait. What? How did it … How did it get here without getting stamped by anyone at anytime? Did the time-space continuum breakdown? Was it delivered via wormhole? Tim! You’ve got to see this. Such is my luck. But, if that’s the worst thing that happens …

Initial problems to tackle: money (see all previous posts), the bicycle, and the director/actor. Okay, the bike. My grandfather purchased a Schwinn road bike last year that will surely be an effective representation of a Tour de France-caliber racing bicycle. Right? Yes, of course. All we need to do is get it from central PA to Jersey--a feat which should be accomplished next weekend.

An addendum to the bike issue: the staging of the apparatus. To save money, we considered constructing our own type of support for the bicycle on stage. (Right, out back in the tool shed, on our work bench. Let me just warm up the radial arm saw.) But in the end, it looks as if it may be easier to just buy a trainer stand; it would support the bike mit actor, be light enough to take into the city, and mobile enough to re-position during the show it self. I’ll admit, I am bit skeptical about this last point. Initially, I had imagined the bike on stage pointed straight at the audience, and remaining that way for the entirety of the show—Spalding Gray on a velocipede. My teammates expressed to me that the audience will be staring at this guy for an hour, so let’s give it a little variety—as well as a sense of the shifts in time & space. The idea is to use periodic blackouts, as determined by the script (oh, wait, there are no blackouts in the script) for rotating the orientation of the bike 45 degrees stage left and right. We’ll see. A director is a voice I would like to add to this conversation and others.

Hitting the Web

So, I attempted my own grassroots, online publicity yesterday. And I think things went rather well. Take this web-log for example. The text is here, organized and legible. Not only did I succeed in not leaking any embarrassing information to the series of tubes that are the Internets, but my computer neither lost power (as it is wont to do) nor crashed at the very idea of publishing a blog—they’re new and hip, and well, my computer is not. I hope to keep this record focused on its intended topic and to ramble on up until that final curtain call. It will be a personal record of this moment in my life—through the lens of my theatrical project—as well as a venue to keep the hungry masses (friends and enemies alike) apprised of our progress as we trudge toward that fateful April week.

Oh, and I think I set up a Facebook event page or something. Again, it’s a miracle I navigated the technical minutiae of the infamous social forum and survived.

First Production Meeting: Budget

Monday, February 16. With a few spare minutes together after dinner, the production team—Mandy, Tim and I—laid out a rough budget, and consulted on collective “belt-tightening” fiscal measures (“chub night” was proposed, but quickly rejected.) Basically, this production will require the sacrifice of our time, money (especially $$$), and our energy. Initial considerations include: security deposit to the theatre (refundable); the price of costuming and props, and their various sources; stipends for the actor, director (one of highest priorities), and sound designer; the going hourly rate for a Manhattan rehearsal space (necessary for auditions, as well as rehearsals) and the cost of printing postcards; and there was even mention of the spiraling travel expenses.

Examining the budget and ephemera, such as how to acquire an helmet, or how the programs are to be formatted, or whether we would make any money off the box office (no, we will not), we arrived at two fund raising measures: one, soliciting city bike shops for sponsorship in return for advertisement space on our program, and second, hitting up every family member who can’t attend the performance for the $20 they would have spent on tickets. Needless to say, it’s crunch time. We need to adjust our priorities, get focused, and let our desperate will to succeed carry us through the next ten weeks. Oh, man … only ten weeks.

Networking in the world of theatre (just add alcohol)

Sunday, February 15. Dumpling house, LES: I introduce my big news—I have a play. And so it begins. A friend of Mandy’s in from L.A. attended the final performance of a production we worked on (resurrecting our dynamic duo, previously seen last fall: The Stage Manager, and Her Assistant). As it happens, he is a sound designer, and I—as of three days earlier—may be in need of such a person’s talents. Wisely, Mandy suggested I bring a copy of my script along and prepared me to approach her friend to ascertain his interest in my project. And wisely, I let the rest of my team chime in until I found my voice.

So, it began with dumplings, but ends in an East Village bar, Prince playing in the background, half-empty glasses littering the table, and an open script on our laps. Here was a professional. Remember: I am no professional (save for my career as a stroller valet). But I am determined to create the best production we can, and I insist that to do so we need to outsource the various tasks of our project to experts. A writer wrote it, but a stage manager will manage the stage, an actor will perform the character, a director will direct the piece, and a children's book author will be the backstage crew, aka “helpie”. And if possible, a sound designer will design the sound. Nervous though I was (beers help with that I’m told), the informality of it all, and my own passion to share my story with an interested stranger—the entire point of this project, from Day 1—came through. And oddly enough, engaging in a conversation with someone who was not present during the creation of my play actually helped me define what it is I’m trying to do. With the perspective of his profession and experience—and the fact that I had just handed him the script minutes before—he asked questions I had never considered. Questions that made me think, but also that gave me confidence in what I’m doing, and even the feeling that someone I hardly know understands what that is and may want to help in the process. And that’s theatre: an art of intensive collaboration and cooperation. It’s all about people, onstage and off.

Starting Line: In the Festival –or- the Rolling Hills of Euphoria and Dread

And fortunately, only a week passed until I received word from the theatre company. Returning home from rehearsal for a late dinner (perfectly acceptable by New York standards), I casually checked my email. And there it was. I was in. They wanted my play—in fact, they would be thrilled to present it. Finally. A breakthrough, validation, success (or something like it.) With arms raised and tears welling in my eyes I announced my news. We jumped around in the hall like fools, and I called my mom.

Then dinner. Cheap white wine? Sure, since all of a sudden it's a night for celebration. And then, it hit me. The end of April and my three performance days were not far off in the least. No, I had less than three months to do … what? Everything. How? I don’t know. Sobering thoughts tempered my euphoria, as would regularly occur over the next few days (and surely the coming weeks.) But I won’t be alone, and I take comfort in that fact. We founded a production team, including my uncle Tim, my aunt Mandy, and myself.

{Scene}

T: “We have to invite everyone we know.”

M: “Oh yes, definitely.”

T: “This is going to be awesome.”

Me: Yes. There you have it. Awesome.

And though I don’t much like to admit it, surges of excitement carried me into sleep: I would be a playwright, I would have a New York production less than a year after graduating school, I am doing something and I have been rewarded with an amazing opportunity and challenge. Forget whatever intentions I had for the immediate future, this is my focus. The clock’s ticking and the work begins.

Prologue: Submitting the Play

God I’m verbose. And I love writing about myself. That’s why this whole “web-log” thing is a bad idea. But you people want to read stuff ...

Well, let’s keep this stage short and to the point. January rolled around, and desperate for a new job, I remembered that I should submit that play I had lying around to upcoming play festivals. As it turns out, my intuition was well-timed. The deadlines for several festivals were in a matter of weeks. So I got the materials, and paged through all the rules and regulations, and ended up sending my script to only one festival at the beginning of February. I had worked at the theater last September, and knew that I would love the opportunity to perform in their intimate, no-frills space. The days of nervous anticipation began …

Training: Writing the Play

So, July 2008: a couple months out of school, unemployed, and living on my aunt and uncle’s futon. Before an afternoon searching for jobs and emailing resumes around the city, my uncle Tim and I would spend the morning slouched on the futon watching the live feed of the Tour de France, as pirated from a foreign sports network. Sometimes we got lucky and could watch the coverage on Versus, and other times we were relegated to watching the live blog postings. But most of the time, German or Hebrew or Spanish or French filtered through the thick humid air to my dozing ears. Hours of microscopic, pixilated, perpetually buffering video of scrawny men cycling though the French countryside—we savored every second, and waited in anticipation for L’Alpe D’Huez, the battle of giants on the legendary slope. Le Tour de France: the greatest display of sport, at times a dramatic spectacle, and at other moments a portrait of the endurance and triumph of the human spirit. There was potential for a story here, and maybe even a play.

At the end of the month, we all began working in a certain play festival in Manhattan. Exposed to a variety of works—not all of them particularly good—we felt confident that we could actually all write our own plays and get them in next year’s festival. One acts, with small casts and low technical needs, they would conform to festival guidelines and could be produced by our apartment troupe. Simple enough, right?

And so, August came. We found our subjects and brainstormed. Though busy with a lame unpaid theater internship, I was still unemployed. So I found myself with blocks of time to kill in the city between interviews and before rehearsals—so I wrote. Later, sweating at my computer, I would take the scribbled product of an hour and type. I researched L’Alpe D’Huez and the epic races which finished on its slope; I read captivating accounts, and even watched archival footage on YouTube. Exhausted men sprouted wings and glided up the ascent, while others cracked and were reeled in; while some became heroes for the day and stood at the peak of their career for only an afternoon, others cemented victory of the Tour itself—le Grand Boucle—and joined the ranks of the legends; and a certain few found drug tests and ignominy awaiting them at the summit. Eventually, from this slightly obsessive state (I lamented having neither a bicycle nor a stationary bike to write from; though I could not properly capture the feeling of riding a bike, I tortured myself running up local hills enough to adequately unleash my acerbic, self-deprecating, and meandering inner monologue) emerged a character and a dozen or so segments of his monologue. Rearranged and formatted, proofread and read aloud in our living room to a captive playwright, yadda yadda yadda … by the end of the month, I had something of a play.