Since all five plays are up, the hard work is finished. This year, I plan to complete the play I’m presently at work upon, and spend the rest of my time finding ways to publicize, optimize and improve the site. The Global Theatre Guide will be up and running as soon as the code is tweaked, and I imagine I’ll end up expanding it to cover a few more European nations. I’m also always on the lookout for a way to improve our Flash performance/viewing experience, so if anyone has any suggestions on that front, please let me know.

This area is intended for the discussion of PlaysInPerpetuity.com’s“Sebastian, Right”.

Way ahead of schedule. At this rate, and I always end up wrong for as yet-unforeseen reasons when I guess about due dates, we could be ready to go by late September. We’re also reworking the home page, to take full advantage of new software, so the site should look much better, as well as function more efficiently, when the same software is applied to the individual Theater pages.

Going very, very well. The degree to which the actors were proficient with their
lines — meaning all the words and in the right order — has made the editing process easy. Also, after giving it some thought, I decided to go with music, and ended up scoring much of the show with Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos, the appropriateness of which will be evident about four lines into the show. The music proves to underscore and highlight the play; had that not proved to be the case, I would have let it be. I had to go outside the Brandenburg Concertos once or twice, to fit moments which required a very specific mood, but Bach came through for us.

This one is more interesting. As is the poster.

Low among the supporting cast of reasons PlaysInPerpetuity.com exists is my dislike for the few sentence or even page-long explanations/treatments of a play one is obligated to provide when sending scripts to theaters, in hopes of production. They are either essentially empty (”A Danish Prince forgoes responsibility to the detriment of all around him”) or accurate to the point of uselessness, save reading the play. A tagline, from an advertising standpoint, presents a similar problem. I wanted something for the latest “Sebastian, Right” poster, that would generate interest while accurately reflecting the content/intentions of the work. I think the below should serve — it sums things up while saying nothing.

I had to find a stethoscope, for use as a prop in the show. The first place had moved to Corpus Christi, which I probably should have seen as an omen, but since I live walking distance from arguably the single best four-square mile radius in the country in which to be sick, I didn’t think it could prove a problem. This was the day of our first dress rehearsal, the second of which was negated by a thunderstorm with delusions of grandeur.

In time, I found myself locked in an enormous concrete basement, with a crematorium as the only available exit — I had not entered through the crematorium, and there were still three other halls to choose from, but in Kubrick-esque fashion, none seemed to lead back to civilization.

The point of this is, I think it is when one is actually trying to accomplish something, that fate seems to conspire most against us. In more extreme examples, or when ridiculous elements such as crematoriums present themselves, this can seem surreal. (And actually, Phantasm is more appropriate an allusion than The Shining.)

“Sebastian, Right” poster finished.

For two days, we remained well ahead of schedule, until we hit a probably inevitable rough patch at the end, due to exertion as much as anything — were the scene order reversed, the same thing might well have happened to the scenes that went so well at the beginning.

But, “Sebastian, Right” is finished, and the editing process will begin next week, after I decompress and recover from last night’s post-shoot party. Everyone did exactly what they were supposed to do, and more, and overall I expect the result will be our best overall work to date. The storm, in the end, did no real damage.

About four days ago, I distinctly remember glancing at a radar screen, and thinking, “At least we’ve gone five for five on storms.” A hurricane in southeast Texas in August is a possibility that must be factored into any plan, and at that point, I felt assured there was no way weather could affect our schedule.

It amounted to at most a sustained drizzle — we get thunderstorms that make Eduardo’s impact seem like a summer breeze — but overly-cautious minds at the theater cost us a day of tech and dress rehearsal. We shoot tomorrow and Thursday; we got everything from the former in last night, but the latter may be quite a ride. No real worries, though.

One of the more interesting, and exciting, parts of watching a a play come together, is when an actor finds his footing, for lack of a better term, and begins to become the person he will portray on stage. I suspect there is something mistakable for magic in all things that qualify as Art — in writing, for me, it comes in moments when I will will write a loose beginning and ending, and the middle will eventually tie the two together in ways I was not consciously aware. Hence the “magic”. I know it was my subconscious at work, but the results always feel like a rabbit pulled from a hat, and it has happened in varying degrees and ways in each play, and I look forward to it happening in the one I’m working on now.

For an actor, from an external point of view, I imagine the magic takes place during the very end of the rehearsal process, after getting to know the character as delivered through the script, and adding on personal nuances probably no one else will understand, with the director’s interpretation serving as a cutting-off point of sorts: “go here, but no further.” You never know, from my perspective, when this change will occur — it helps to be off-book, of course, freeing both the individual and fellow actors to explore the role without being dragged out of the moment, back to the page. But the change, when it happens, is genuinely
startling — a good actor is suddenly someone else, a replica of an un-embodied individual heretofore existing only in the writer’s mind, with, ideally, a near-doppelganger also extant in the the director’s mind.

This is all coming around to the fact that James, our lead, is quite good at what he does — some people try to Act, and some were either born or shaped into Actors, and he is among the latter. Whatever it is, he has it. It was only a few moments last week where he was in the place/persona I expect him to maintain, come the middle of next week, and it would be wrong to expect him to be there throughout rehearsal — I suspect whatever it is the process produces, is finite, and need be conserved. But it was, as I said, easily mistaken for magic. We’re shooting this Wednesday and Thursday, and I am more than optimistic about the results. At this point, I need to throw about 60 various small props in a box, be there when the big ones arrive at the theater, and we should be good to go.

Also: finally saw Batman, after forcing everyone else to speak in whispers for a week. The Ledger Oscar question, for me, should be looked at as though he were still alive: were he, I imagine he would be nominated for a brilliant performance and be seen as a dark-horse candidate, because it was a comic book-based film, and the Academy likes to take itself perhaps a bit too seriously. That said, as with the first, it was among the best written movies I’ve ever seen. I wish it were possible, and I know it isn’t, for the effects to have been scaled back to the point of the feasible — it would have supported the gritty realism of the performances and dialogue. (Actually, now that I think about it, they may have been, somewhat — I think he drove up a building in the first one, and I don’t remember anything paralleling that, in terms of the fantastic, in the second.) Also, Aaron Eckhart seems to be being overlooked: what he did with what he had was on a par with Ledger’s work — both were given believable dialogue and propelled by a script that functioned realistically — events made sense. That movie embodied all an actor could hope to be involved with, and if Ledger had to go, he has his blaze of glory.