Nobody Knows Anything

Got an unusual comment from Christina the other day:

You were a joy to read… before twitter. Now, not so much. Seriously, have you not better things to say?

Well, the Twitter is basically a way to have something to say, frankly. I suppose everyone who’d be interested in my tweets have probably added me to their own Twitter lists, so I could probably stop posting them here. (I’m DianePatterson on Twitter, btw, in case you’re looking for me.)

But to answer your question: at the moment I haven’t found a particular raison d’être for this blog. Many of the things I’d like to talk about really aren’t fair for me to talk about much (for instance: my kids—yeah, I know, I win some kind of Mom-points for finally figuring that out) and others are just…well…

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After two incredibly busy weeks, the Third Annual Foothill College New Works Festival comes to an end. I can’t believe it — I remember looking at the summer of rehearsals and going, Wow, this is going to take forever, and like every time you have that thought: Poof. It’s over.

The whole experience was fabulous. Watching the director work with the actors, seeing the actors try various things, sitting through several rehearsals of not only my show but others to see how they were coming together: priceless. Also, my critical faculties zoomed way up during the process — as I told Mary Ann during our drives to and from Foothill, I was itching to get out my red pen and edit everyone’s play, not just my own. “Give me a chance, I’ll take out five minutes from everyone’s play!” I said. (This wasn’t an option for any of us; final edits were due July 24: they were not chancing playwrights rewriting up until opening night.)

The only thing that had me really, really worried was that the show was really, really long (two and a half hours, including intermission) and my play was last. Why was mine last? Was this a comment on my play? Would the audience even stay that long to see mine? (Seriously, I can overanalyze anything.) I liked the friends who told me mine was last because you always save the best for last. I have no idea how in fact the show order was chosen, but that explanation suited me just fine.

And then, August 10, the birthday of moi, the New Works Festival opened. I discovered that I can’t see a play as if for the first time: all I could see was where the actors did something different, or missed a line. Why didn’t the audience laugh at that? Or, why did they laugh at that line, that was never funny before. I couldn’t accurately judge what the audience thought of any one play, but they sure seemed to like the evening overall. The actors had so much more energy with an actual audience there. Lines went faster, action became more electric. Theater is a participatory sport, whether or not the audience knows it.

Darin went to the show on Saturday night.

Darin’s special genius is being able to honestly assess things for what they are, point out their strengths, and analyze their weaknesses. This turns out to be a very marketable skill (as you might imagine), although a couple of times it’s really, really annoyed some people; they don’t want to hear criticism, they just want to hear how great everything is. If this is what you want, Darin is not your guy. I don’t show everything I write to Darin, because if I ask him what he thinks, he’s going to tell me. Only when I’m sure I’m ready to hear it do I ask.

When he came home from the show, he said, “I’m not sure which was the best, yours or (other play), but I liked both of them for (list of reasons here).” And you have no idea how much that critique meant to me. We discussed some of the other plays too, and he had much the same take on most of them that I did. I’m sure if I would have let him, he would have done an analysis of my play that would show me where I could strengthen it and explain a bit more, and which parts I could cut but I didn’t ask and he’s not going to volunteer (because he likes being married and he knows my process by now).

My friend Rob went with Darin Saturday and told me he really enjoyed it too, particularly mine. He even said, “You should write more of these,” which was nice to hear. And he even explained to me why mine was last: “no dull moments…
perhaps not every joke worked, but one had not time to ponder it because, hey, here’s the next one.”

So, it’s all over now. Alas. I am quite fired up to finish a full-length play and submit to a few festivals. The Foothill Playwriting class starts Sept. 26 — if you’re looking for a great writing class with a committed (and committable) bunch of writers in it, I highly recommend it.

Tonight is the Preview, and tomorrow (MY BIRTHDAY, there’s one shopping day left) is the OPENING NIGHT. And the show looks really, really good. I saw the dress rehearsal last night and was amazed by a)how good the costumes for my play are — I laughed a couple of times just at those) and b)how some actors can still get laughs with certain lines even after we’ve all seen all of the shows about 493 times. And there are the serious plays that are still affecting, still after 493 performances. It’s all good stuff.

Remember: here’s the show info (mine is the one with both God and the devil, just in case you were wondering), and you can buy tickets online for the Foothill New Works Festival. It’s two hours of entertaining theater for a low price! Where else do you get that kind of return on your investment? Come on, you know you want to.

While we were in New York, we saw three plays: The Lion King (We did it for the kids, okay? And it is an amazing theatrical presentation, despite presenting one of the most abhorrent and unAmerican storylines imaginable), Frost/Nixon, and Talk Radio.

Frost/Nixon achieved one thing I thought would have been impossible: it made me wonder how the story was going to turn out. We have the story of how David Frost became the guy to score the big interview with post-Watergate Richard Nixon. Frost was evidently a lightweight show host, better known for his partying than his journalistic skills. And Nixon was, well, Nixon — bloody but unbowed after Watergate. Nixon wants to get back into politics, be the grand old man in Washington, and Frost wants to make a name for himself, rolling everything he’s got professionally and financially on setting this interview up. After much negotiation, the interviews finally start…and Frost gets hammered by Nixon, who’s an old pro at taking charge. What is Frost going to do?

Frank Langella is great as Nixon, and Michael Sheen is wonderful as Frost. The supporting cast is pretty good — the narrator is an associate of Frost who informs us of scene changes and where and when we are at any point. During the interviews, the actors are projected on TV monitors at the back of the stage, so Frost and Nixon get the job of doing stage acting and screen acting at the same time.

However, there’s something I really need to investigate: according to my playwriting teacher, Actors Equity rules say that every single actor on stage gets paid the same, no matter what — which is why these days you don’t have the casts of thousands you might have had in, say, a Noel Coward play. In Frost/Nixon, however, there are a ton of actors on the stage, and some of them have very few lines. One of them, Nixon’s dresser, had one line. And no one is in that theater to see anyone except Frank Langella. So the producers have got to be compensating Langella somehow, if not by salary, than by some other method.

Talk Radio is Eric Bogosian’s play about a foul-mouthed shock jock the night before he goes into national syndication. He manages to alienate his friends and his lover — will he manage to alienate all of us, too? Who is this guy, what drives him to do the things he does? Barry Champlain, the talk radio host, does a number of interviews with callers, who want to argue with him, or praise him, or what have you. We get monologues from his friend/sound engineer, from his producer/girlfriend, from the liaison to the corporate bosses, and finally from Champlain himself, after everyone has walked out on him due to his abusive behavior. Liev Schreiber was great as Champlain, who was infuriating and hateful, while simultaneously absolutely refusing to change who he was for anyone or anything.

Three interesting things about this show:

1) Both Darin and I were stunned by how mediocre the actors doing the sound engineer and the producer were during their monologues. I mean, this is New York: you can walk into any Dunkin’ Donuts and say, “I need 35 classically trained actors!” and walk out with a full cast plus backups. I have no idea how these two got their jobs. They weren’t awful. They just weren’t very good.

2) The actors weren’t miked, which seems to be fairly rare these days. The only time anyone was miked was when Champlain was on the air.

3) The show is set in 1987, and during his on-air stint Champlain rants about several 1987-era things, primarily Iran-Contra. During Champlain’s monologue, which ended the damn show, someone screams from the top balcony, “Talk about the Iraq War!” You could hear a pin drop in the theater. Then Schreiber gets started again and once again we hear, “Talk about the Iraq War!” followed by furious hissing and shouting. I believe Schreiber, mid-monologue, started to crack up, completely ruining the dramatic import of whatever the hell he was saying. In fact, pretty much all I can remember of the monologue is that some asshole who’d just spent $50 on a ticket to a play just ruined the end of the play for everyone in that theater.

The kids and I got off the plane at 10:30pm Sunday night — Darin had flown home the day before to rehearse for the Developer’s Conference up in San Francisco (you may have heard a little bit about the recent project he developed: Safari for Windows?).

Monday night Darin was still up in San Francisco and I headed out to Foothill College for the first night of auditions for the New Works Festival. We saw maybe twenty actors, doing “sides” (small excerpts) from everyone’s plays, for the directors and playwrights in the Festival. By the end of the evening, the playwrights totally hated their own plays and probably everyone else’s too. Hearing the same damn thing over and over again can make you crazy.

That said: it was fascinating to watch how some actors just leaped off the stage at you, grabbed you by the throat, and said, “I have presence!” You could tell when every director and playwright in the room was writing down exclamation marks next to an actor’s name. One actor was so good that, even though we’d seen one particular side about 48 times, she still managed to crack us up with it. That is beyond talent, it’s just lightning in a bottle. I have no idea why some people have it and some don’t.

I got home at 11. Darin got home some time after that, so he won on the “busy” spectrum.

Tuesday night we all trooped back to Foothill for the second night of auditions. Everyone had said that the second night would be much bigger in terms of number of actors, because actors are superstitious and believe that if they come the first night you’ll forget them. (One of the people sitting in the theater said, “Well, that’s pretty much true, actually.”) However, rumor did not turn out to be true, and we had fewer actors to see. Then afterward the playwrights and directors and festival management got together and hashed out casting lists for everyone’s play, and I think everyone was fairly pleased with how things shook out.

Wow, is casting not an easy process. For one thing, actors just have to spontaneously do their best, with no rehearsal, with no preparation. For another thing, what one person might like in an actor, another person might not like at all. (In fact, that happened to my carpool mate and me with one actor: she was thrilled with the audition, I was like, “Are you kidding?”) And then there were some actors who were very good but just completely wrong for the roles available. And then there were the actors we all know but had nothing for — that was the toughest. What do you say next time you see them? “You were great, you just weren’t right for the play.” It’s true…but it hurts.

Despite seeing many fewer actors and casting the plays relatively quickly, I still got home at 10:30. Everyone was asleep.

Wednesday night was Playwriting class, and in addition to some very funny stuff by one writer (including a deeply funny and vicious sendup of the audition night process), we did 41 pages of my current play in progress. And I got glowing reviews from my classmates, and since I know how critical they can be, I was walking on air afterward. (I tried walking on water: failed miserably.) I told everyone I’d written all of the pages they hadn’t seen before pretty much on the flight from San Francisco to New York (when I was flying first class), and the teacher suggested they take up a collection to send me on a flight from San Francisco to Australia so I could finish it.

I got home at 10:30 and wasn’t walking particularly steadily. I avoided falling asleep during the car ride and felt this was a great victory.

Thursday I collapsed and napped at home while the kids played World of Warcraft and watched whatever TV shows they wanted. I don’t want to fall asleep when I’m home with the kids, but I couldn’t stop myself. And they hadn’t watched much TV or played World of Warcraft in weeks, so I didn’t feel too guilty.

Just during the auditions I felt like I learned a ton about how to put on a show. I am so thrilled to be involved with the New Works Festival — Foothill is a great training ground for actors, writers, and directors. I’ve gotten much more hands on experience with the process of actually making a script into reality there than I ever did at USC. How amazing is that?

Next week: the kids are in camp and I’m just going to sleep.