Drama Desk Awards

Conleth Hill, who played Ivan in the Seafarer, was just nominated for a Drama Desk award for best featured actor in a play. I have no idea what these are, or what a featured actor is, as opposed to the regular kind, but no matter. This was the only nomination for this play, which is crazy.

Anyway. Can't find him online anywhere, except in this series, The Life and Times of Vivienne Vyle, starring Jennifer Saunders. He plays the extremely effete husband of a toxic talk show host. It's dark and strangely funny. I've now watched a bunch of clips of this show, which is not available on Netflix, and I think he's doing a parody of the perfect celebrity wife. Here's a tiny clip that doesn't do it justice, but it's one of the few clips that doesn't drop the f bomb.

Broadway Bowls!

The story about Broadway actors and stagehands in their Thursday night beer league will finally run,I think, this Saturday on Only a Game. Locally, the show starts at 7a.m., on WBUR (90.9 FM), but the story will probably run in the final segment, starting around 7:45. Luckily, there's a podcast, too, usually posted a day or so after the show airs.

It should run, unless some unforeseen sports-related emergency develops between now and then. Among those quoted in the story are two actors from the Seafarer, Ciaran Hinds (what a lovely man he is) and Sean Mahon (tall, cute, mentioned Bulgaria at least once). Would have loved to quote Conleth Hill (left, more on him later) but he hates microphones. No, seriously. Famous stage actor. Brilliant. Nice guy. Decent bowler. Won't talk about himself. What can you do? At the very end of the night, at 2:30 a.m., when it was time for them to go home and for me to make the trek through Times Square back to my hotel room, Hill said, "I'm sorry. Put a microphone in front of me and I look like a dog that's been told to take a bath."

Last Call for Seafarer

The Sunday matinee was packed. Packed. Who knew? I sat next to a nice couple and chatted them up before it started. Turns out, the guy sitting next to me had read with one of the actors, one of the understudies, for his audition last year. He loved the scene so much that he had asked the other actor if he could keep his copy of the monologue. And the actor said, "No way. I need it." So, here he was at the theater to see the monologue he'd mooned over. He'd been in a bunch of plays himself and had done some movie work. We talked. I said, "You're going to love this." Then I said, "You're not going to be able to take your eyes of Jim Norton. No one can." 

How wrong I was. The acting had changed utterly since I saw the play in January. There was so much more going on in every moment. To call the performances freewheeling would understate matters completely. David Morse's shouting was incoherent on multiple occasions. Unrecognizable as speech. And he lifted the chair over his head to throw it, nearly decapitating the stage left set.  The actors were smirking at each other, menacing each other. Conleth Hill had a strange glint in his eye like he'd gone to crazyland, and was inviting the rest of them to join him. He dragged out bits of business, withheld lines for long beats. When Sean Mahon (most improved player) went off to kick the wall, Ciaran Hinds spent the rest of the scene trying to stop himself from laughing. Unsuccessfully. At intermission, I said to the guy next to me, "I'm afraid that one of those guys might don a toga and shout food fight." The guy said, "Yeah. They're pretty happy with what they're doing up there. " I thought: Are you not hearing me? I fear gunplay is imminent. They've gone quite mad. All of them. 

During the second act, I found myself sitting forward in my seat. I was awed and afraid. No other way to put it. The guy next to me also sat forward. The energy kept escalating and became truly weird. And yet at the moment when Ivan runs in with his glasses, I had the exact same thought as before. "Oh, no. It's almost over." That was the only thing that hadn't changed.

Book Questions, part II

We have a meeting in New York on Monday to meet the purchasing agent, in part as further proof that we co-authors exist. This is a version of all the meetings we had scheduled with all of the publishing houses before we settled on one place (or, rather, they settled on us). At this meeting many, many questions will be asked and answered. It's kind of like having a first date after the wedding. Having taught in Chinatown, I know what I'm talking about here. As awkward as it sounds, these things do sometimes work out.

This will be a large meeting, or a series of them in which we talk at length with the editor about the direction of the book, and then we'll meet everyone on the "team." We've been told that it is an "excited team." I suppose we co-authors making the trek to NYC are to be known as the "nervously excited team." Maybe we're all nervous. I'm working away at an expanded outline. And another short outline, too, as an extra security blanket. And I'm packing a list of discarded book titles. We've already been put on notice that our provisional title isn't right. We need to generate a list of alternates on which the marketing people can work further. There is also talk of generating a website/blog for the book-to-be. A lot of issues have to be discussed even though they won't become relevant for months, maybe even a year from now. A book like this can't be just a book, it must be a marketing force. It must be armed with special powers, for which we need to be weaving spells now.

My first question while booking train tickets was this: Is another trip to The Seafarer a possibility? Ticket for one, front and center? One last time before it closes in a little over a week? (Yes, I am that crazy.) Can I see my five thespian boyfriends one more time?

Not only did Larry not laugh at this, he didn't even say no. Instead, he said, "Sure. Why not?"I didn't have to flash him even one bogus reason. Not one painful attempt at a brogue. So, I now have a train ticket that gets me into the city just in time to scurry to the theater for the Sunday matinee. And that leaves time enough after to finish the outline in the hotel before the pre-game co-author confab over dinner at which we can work out the jitters.

Searching for Mr. Mahon

Number of minutes spent interviewing Mr. Mahon for the NPR bowling story: 2

Number of minutes spent logging the tape from this interview: 14

Percentage of interesting, bowling-related remarks made by him that are unusable because I stepped all over them, perhaps because the interview took place 3 hours past my bedtime, perhaps because I'd been awake for 36 hours straight, perhaps because I was still flustered from recent encounter with hunky Mr. Flapjack Tits: 33

Minutes spent waffling over the viability of two remaining, unsullied quotes: 10

Differing places the selected quote occupied in the story before a producer looked at it: 7

Number of Irishmen in the entire bowling alley, amongst a field of 120 bowlers: 4

Percentage of Irishmen present who were interviewed, with great interest, by me: 75

Number of times I considered that perhaps the Irish were in danger of being a tad over-represented in the story: 0 

Number of times my husband questioned my pronunciation of Mr. Mahon's last name after the long-buried, genetic, Boston-Irish link to the motherland roused itself inside him, yet again: 1

Times I said to Larry, "He's not going to hear it, anyway:" 3

Times Larry shook his head in response and said, "I'm just saying you'd better check:" 3

Minutes spent frantically scrolling through digital tracks, in vain, to find the interview in a hope against hope that I had, in fact, asked Mr. Mahon to say his name on tape, as any professional would do, if she had half a brain, even if she had just previously spent several minutes in the presence of hunky Mr. Flapjack Tits: 22

Number of times I cursed myself using unprintable language: 11

Frantic emails sent to co-commissioner of bowling league asking if there is any way she might know this guy and/or how to say his name:2

Times I checked email in the two hours before morning edit with producer: 17

Times I checked email after the morning edit while waiting to voice the story: 15

Elapsed time, in minutes, spent mining the electronic landfill known as the Internet collecting irrelevant scraps of information about Mr. Mahon, including his age (41), and his day job (personal trainer) in an effort to discover the correct pronunciation of his name: 123

Mr. Mahon's IMDB listings: 12

Number of his appearances on ER, voice-overs for dragons, and roles in a Sci-Fi channel movies of the week: 1

Appearances on Line of Fire, which I had never heard of: 4

Number of acting coaches who use Mr. Mahon's head shot and enthusiastic endorsement in online brochure copy: 1

Number of gay men's websites that speak of him with lust and admiration: 5 (and counting)

Percent chance that he is, in fact, gay: 35

Number of nude or explicit photos of him on the internet: 0

Minutes spent mentally composing Google searches likely to yield such photos: 3

Time, in minutes, spent wondering how to find any nude photos of any attractive men in order to alleviate anxious boredom: 7

Amount, in dollars, of money personally raised by Mr. Mahon in 2004 to fight Leukemia: 60,456

Elapsed time, in seconds, of self-imposed guilt trip over having hoped, however casually, to glimpse the dinky of a great humanitarian: 52

Percentage of the five-man cast of the Seafarer interviewed by reporters representing various broadcast media, including podcast, during which the reporters stated their names clearly and correctly: 80

Number of times Mr. Mahon was interviewed by said reporters, who might even inadvertently have pronounced his name correctly: 0

Number of times I watched Mr. Mahon's acting demo reel on YouTube, even after I knew it would not teach me how to say his name: 4

Additional minutes spent wondering what sort of parts he would be good for: 12

Time spent setting up a YouTube account so that I could send an email to whoever posted the demo reel, in hopes of getting the pronunciation right:40

Number of attempts to send email: 3

Number of responses: 0

Times I entertained the irrational notion that the person who posted that reel is, in fact, a crazed fan: 17

Times I feared that I was becoming a crazed fan: 3

Number of attempts to convince the show's producer that we could cut this quote and any reference to Mr. Mahon without losing substance: 2

Minutes prior to voicing tracks that I checked email one final time to find a response from bowling league contact that contained the correct pronunciation: 1

Amount of time spent considering that I made a day-long obsession out of a single syllable word, and over the life and career of a total stranger: as little as possible

THE EXERCISE: Make a list. The items on it and the order in which they are listed should tell a story. With any luck, the resulting story is shorter and tighter than the one above (and displays less overt craziness on the part of the writer).

Celebrity Encounters

John Dufresne's The Lie That Tells The Truth is a great beginning guide to fiction writing. It contains tons of prompts plus pithy advice. For example, on being afraid to write because your attempts are awful, "You aren't perfect. Neither is your writing. Get over it. Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor." I like that. 

OK, then. One of his prompts is to re-write a celebrity encounter. Everyone has had some brush with the famous, either good or bad. He says you should think about what happened, and then "Imagine that what happened was not all that happened. Imagine that the pair of you were tossed together by fate." It's a scene of what might have happened after the original encounter. But this time, you help the celebrity change a flat tire or find her keys or steal something. This is a story containing a character like you and a character like the celebrity you met.

I tried the opposite. If the celebrity encounter is imminent and unavoidable, I wondered, what would happen if I wrote out possible outcomes beforehand? That's what I did for several hours on the train to New York City. I wrote five of them, all disastrous. Well, at first all disastrous. Somehow disaster satisfies like no other outcome. It soothes and energizes at the same time. (People who smoke tell me that this is what cigarettes do, too.) So, in one I was so nervous that I puked on him. And fainted. And had to be carried out on a stretcher with no dignity and no story. In another I waited too long to interview him. Avoided him until late, too late, because he was drunk. Roaring drunk. And I mean Peter O'Toole drunk.  And while I tried to interview him he ignored me at first. The he stole the microphone, ripping it out of the kit and hiding it.  Then he accidentally clothes-lined me in some sort of broad gesture to someone across the room. In a third version he didn't show up at all. In the fourth, he politely declined to speak to me, saying that other people deserve attention, but I wouldn't take the hint. I continued to insist, and he continued to deflect until we both became rude and upset.  

In the fifth version, I was more moderate. In this version, I did my job of talking to lots of different people. When I approached him, he did his job of answering questions in a polite and perfunctory way. The evening ended without incident. Perhaps this was the saddest version of all. (Sadder still, because this is pretty much how it actually played out.)

Guilty Pleasures 4

Early in the second act of The Seafarer, actor Ciaran Hinds takes a fall. He reaches out for a chair and tips it and goes down flat out on his face. Boom. Try that eight times a week. At least I think it was intentional. I read the play again afterward and it's not there. The line that follows, "I'm f*ing going in and out of time zones here" is there, but no fall. (Was he wearing a cup for that? Wouldn't a cup be a good idea?) A bunch of other lines aren't in the printed play as well. At one point Richard, who is a practiced drunk, turns to his newly sober brother and says, "We know you're an alcoholic and your life is tatters and it's a struggle for you to grasp human emotions, but..." That line is not in the play, except for the last bit. I looked for it later, because it stood out, that line. 

I know all this because last Thursday Larry and I saw the kids off to school and preschool, told them to be good for their grandma, then got on a train to New York to see our first-ever Broadway play. 

We walked from our hotel to the playhouse in the rain. The stage was lower than I would have thought and smaller, with a compact, even claustrophobic, set. But what shocked me most was the quiet audience. Here's the devil flat on his face and nothing but silence for a whole beat. Then he says, "Oops." Nothing. A few giggles, maybe. Then he just gets up and the play takes off again at the same breakneck speed as the first act. I wondered at the strangely silent audience (and I was part of that) even though the play is very funny. The devil keeps talking about taking someone to hell through the hole in the wall and then when there's a snag in this plan, another character says, "Well, that's a pain in the hole." Juvenile, but just right. And yet we just sat there, clinging to our seats. Maybe we're conditioned against laughing at drunks. The silence didn't take away from the experience. At the point when Ivan runs in screaming about his glasses I thought, oh, no, this is the beginning of the end. 

At the end, everyone stood to clap. Larry's eyes were shining. But the two older ladies next to him on the aisle bolted out of the theater between the two curtain calls. Like their hair was on fire. Funny thing, one of the actors looked down at those seats. Then his eyes flicked up at their retreating backs, while everyone else is roaring and clapping. 

Because we weren't ready to go back to our little hotel room, we stopped in a bar. Larry went off to order drinks and came back with two shots of whiskey, said it was Powells. He said it was the same stuff they were drinking in the play. OK. He was very serious about the whole thing. We talked about the play and he understood it better than I did. It's a play for men, really, which is not a criticism. We talked about the actors and this gave me a chance to weigh in as an authority. This one was in The Yalta Game a few years ago in which he killed. Killed. Like it was written for him. And this one toured with Stones in His Pockets, in which two actors do dozens of parts. And this one, with the stunning presence,  has been in lots of  McPherson plays, The Weir and Come on Over. It's like a collaboration at this point. (Here is the true tragedy of the internet; it can make a pseudo-intellectual of any idiot with an index finger and an idle hour.) 

Larry listened to all this. He said, "I see it now. You're going to be a groupie for all these guys." 

"Yes," I said. "Yes! And why not?"

Larry said we should do this again. I told him that Shining City is at the Huntington in March. He looked into his glass and said, "Get tickets now."

Guilty Pleasures 3

Found out in September that a certain actor I admire would star in a Broadway play set to open in November. I asked Larry to take me, and he agreed, mostly because he wasn't listening. Much marital legislation gets introduced in those two minutes between sex and sleep. When I brought it up next, he balked. 

"Go all the way down to New York? For a play?"

"Please?"

"What? So you can look at Mr. Flapjack Tits?" He was getting wound up.

"It played in London last year. The West End. It killed." 

He looked at me like I'd stopped speaking English. "Train tickets. Hotel. Food." He held up fingers as he talked. "Plus the tickets for the play, which are what?"

"A hundred."

"Each, right?"

I nodded. 

"This would cost more than a mortgage payment."

"He's a true stage actor. You have to see him in person."

"We were going to buy a couch with that money."

"It's Broadway, honey. It'll be fun."

That was that for a few weeks. I continued to talk about The Seafarer as though we were going to go, and to this Larry generally offered to make pancakes, saying, "You can look at those and pretend they're your boyfriend's tits."

The strike hit in November and no plays opened for three weeks. During this time I checked out all of the Conor McPherson plays from the library and read them and read them out loud and followed Larry all around the house talking about them, about the long monologues and supernatural touches, the Catholicism, the drinking and drinking, the yearning, the hopelessly bad sex. Larry informed me that my fake Irish brogue is dreadful, painful. We entertained a lengthy discussion about the appropriate way to drop the f-bomb in an Irish accent. He voted for fah-king. I went for foh-king. Although we never agreed, I knew his resolve had cracked.

The day the strike ended, he caved. We picked a date well after Christmas, right after his March deadline, found a time when his mother could watch the kids. Third week of January, when it's bitterly cold in New York and the hotels are dead. He called from work to say that he bought tickets in the second row. "Not going to throw your panties on stage, are you?" Funny guy.

I had six weeks to wait. I read all the plays and all about them. I like especially the early ones with the endless monologues that read like short stories. I began to tell anecdotes about them at dinner, about the actor who fainted on stage after he forgot his lines, about the actor who drank actual whisky onstage instead of apple juice. Although he got through the play, after some substantial pauses at the end, he then went on a bender, invited himself home with several women and nearly got himself beaten to death by their boyfriends. I told these stories as though they had been told to me by the playwright, not as though I'd read them in a book. I talked about Brian Cox as though we were pals. Larry took all this patiently, poor man. He showed interest--or faked it--right along. They talk about the cornerstone of a good marriage being the love and commitment, the trust. No. It's looking across the dinner table at the deeply, deeply crazy person you've married and just nodding at whatever she says no matter how bored you are. Men do this a lot and they don't get nearly enough credit for it.

THE EXERCISE: Gorge yourself on a single writer in any gnere. Read every scrap. Leave nothing on the table. Imitate the writer's style in your journal, slip anecdotes about his or her life into conversations. Become an authority on a voice that's utterly different from your own.