The Plan

Well, not really ‘live’, but you know what I mean.

THE DOPLER EFFECT

More to come….

Photo by Zach Behrens

The LAist has been covering 365 plays/365 days in Los Angeles from the beginning. I don’t know if they’re the only ones covering it, but they’re certainly doing the best job. The photo above comes from their article covering the Black Dahlia’s performance on 1/20/07.

Of the eight pieces, two were directed by Obi Ndefo, the guy who directed Week 5 for the Alliance. He is The Real Deal. The LAist’s article lays out the scene at the Dahlia pretty cleanly. I hadn’t intended to be in a 365 since experimental theatre isn’t really my thing, but this was quick and dirty and a whole bunch of fun. Bonus: Susan-Lori Parks came. I said ‘thank you for doing this.’

That’s me with the pretty pretty wings.

Why I Hate My Job

This is an actual conversation I had, more or less:

JANUARY 12, 2007

PSYCHO CO-WORKER: Hey, we should have them throw us a little anniversary party; I started a year ago, and you started a year ago tomorrow.

ME: Actually, last September marked a year for me.

PCW: No, I remember you came in in your suit and you had your briefcase -

ME: I don’t have a briefcase.

PCW: Well, you had SOMETHING!

ME: I don’t know what to tell you.

I mean, it’s not like this shit isn’t written down.

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So, yeah, my license was suspended. I think it actually says ‘because you’re a douchebag’ on the notice. It’s been a fairly trying period, but we keep trying, don’t we? Thanks to Robert and Adam for keeping me close enough to a life to keep a grip.

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There have been some cool things recently that I won’t mention just yet. Well, besides this. Actually, it’s probably best if I just delete this part. But I’m not going to.

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Oh, yeah:

BAM!

The Dopler Effect is coming

Carla’s also working on a website for Don’t Gag Me! There’s a placeholder page up, but I won’t link to it yet because she yells at me when I do things like that.

I’ve once again been wrestling with cigarettes, cloves this time. It’s the loneliness that does it. They’re like little friends.

Unfortunately, all this really does is once again throw into relief the fact that these things, these crutches, don’t fix the problem, they mask it. I do not want to be a smoker again.

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I need to start making some money. I’m not yet through with the experiment; I won’t be until I’m on a journey of my choosing. Well, I guess I already am, but one with leather seats would be nice. The debts worry me, but only so much. After all, if I can’t pay, I can’t pay. But it wears.

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This weekend we shot Don’t Gag Me!, and I can’t WAIT to see how it came out. It felt good; Carla brought together a hell of a crew, wrote a fun script and gave a great performance. It’s inspiring to work with someone like that, someone who makes things happen, through sheer force of will if necessary. Today I shot another episode of The Dopler Effect, which I really feel is going to be a cut above most of what’s floating around the net these days.

I have another audition for a short tomorrow, and a few other things which could - should they come to pass - help ease some of my other troubles. Which is, of course, the fucking goal.

That, and an oscar.

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There are now ten more performances of Westward Expansion through next Saturday. Starting Monday, it will run in conjunction with the Alliance’s week of Susan-Lori Parks’ 365. This should be fun.

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Hmmm, this is kind of a downer post. Oh well, at least nobody died in this one.

First up, the Backstage West review of the show. I can’t really take issue with it; it says a ton of good things and adds a few criticisms that I think are sort of par for the course when a show tries to pack so much into such a short time. Still sounds like she had fun:

Westward Expansion
November 29, 2006
By Jennie Webb

Okay, who doesn’t like trains? And I’m not talking the metro rail or subway. No. Real trains that travel from coast to coast. Trains are fabulous things, whether it’s our personal memories or imaginary musings or just the idea of ’em: traveling across the country, inevitably reaching their destinations at a speed that allows for oh-so-many possibilities, undeniably mechanical yet somehow magical, grounded yet capable of taking us on wonderful flights of fantasy. But in this day and age, in America, as a reasonable means of cross-country transportation, they’re pretty much dinosaurs. Writer-director Cecil Castellucci gets this and then some. Her new play is a love letter to all things Amtrak, and it has a definite charm and is well-mounted, with skill and affection. Unfortunately, it’s so stylistically schizophrenic that after it’s over we haven’t arrived anywhere it seems we’re supposed to.

On a simple set, Castellucci puts two pairs of sweet young things traveling in opposite directions. Going west in 1881 we meet a stylish man seeking his fortune (Ransom Boynton) and a woman (Darcy Martin) heading toward a teaching job and possible rancher husband. The 2006 eastbound couple is made up of a woman (Royana Black) on her way to meet her Internet pal, hoping it’ll be a romance, and a quirky philosopher (Jeremy Sean) looking for answers. Rashelle Stocker plays the conductor, interacting with the couples in both centuries and guiding the audience through the history of trains, among other things. The actors relate to the audience as well as to each other, and they narrate from correspondence and diaries, relate itineraries, divulge secrets, enact fantasies and scenes from Alfred Hitchcock movies (complete with video), sing and dance, and so on.

Although the talented actors seem to have a grasp on the all-over-the-map pieces of often-fun material—the playwright’s honest and humorous dialogue works particularly well in the hands of the vulnerable Black and Sean, who couldn’t be more adorably dysfunctional—and Castellucci makes use of her admirable chops as a director, at this point Westward Expansion has a ways to go before it becomes a journey audiences will get much out of.

$10! Come see it….

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“I don’t recognize myself anymore” is a bit of a cliche, but I find myself thinking it more and more often these days. It starts with the physical changes, mainly due to exercise and weight loss. I found a couple of little ridges on my eye sockets that I’m fairly sure I’ve never seen before. I look in the mirror, and not only do I not recognize the face, I’m not entirely sure what to do with it. Then I start to feel like I don’t recognize my facial expressions anymore, and then my thoughts. I don’t know if any of that makes any sense, but it freaks me out a little bit.

—___—___—___— It’s been really cold the last few nights, and when you live in a car, cold is COLD. I can’t help but think how much worse it is for those who don’t even have that. Every night in Santa Monica, near the Promenade, you can see people sleeping in the parking lots of closed businesses. They use the little cement blockers as pillows, and roll themselves up in blankets and sleeping bags like stinky little Blunts. That must suck.
 

I told you I was going to steal it.

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From the L.A. Weekly:

WESTWARD EXPANSION Cecil Castellucci’s one-act emerges as a lighthearted potpourri about railroad travel, combining two fragmentary plots with documentary footage of trains, dialogue from Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest and Strangers on a Train, a brief rendition of “On the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe,” and a chatty conductor (Rashelle Stocker) who rhapsodizes about railroads. (She points out that long, cross-country train journeys foster personal encounters as shorter air trips never can.) Two women from different eras are traveling across the country in opposite directions. The Woman From 1881 (Darcy Martin), going from Boston to Tucson to take up a teaching job, meets a reckless young man (Ransom Boynton) who’s seeking a new life in the West. The Woman From 2006 (Royana Black) is traveling from L.A. to Boston to hook up with a guy she met on the Internet, but she has a potentially life-changing encounter with a shy, erudite young historian (Jeremy Sean), who’s addicted to quotations. The piece is pleasant but slight: long on charm but short on narrative heft. Of the quartet, Black and Sean have the more richly developed characters to play, which they exploit by skillfully sketching their comic tics and idiosyncrasies. ALLIANCE REPERTORY COMPANY, 3204 W. Magnolia Blvd., Burbank; Thurs.-Sat., 8 p.m.; thru Dec. 16 (no perfs Nov. 23-25). NOTE: Performances nightly Dec. 11-17, in tandem with plays from Suzan-Lori Parks’ 365 Days/365 Plays. (800) 595-4849. (Neal Weaver)

This makes me happy. Quite happy. Even the criticisms really aren’t - the thing runs under an hour, after all. Come see it.

L.A. Weekly

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The Dopler Effect: I don’t know when it’s coming, but I can’t wait. I keep hearing ever cooler things about it. It’ll be fun.

Don’t Gag Me!: Getting together with the entire crew soon. I don’t want to say too much because Carla hasn’t given me permission, and I think she likes hurting me.

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Westward Expansion opened on Friday and seems to be going over well. One of the things that drew me to the Alliance in the first place was the quality of the people there. I’m not exactly the Old Man of Los Angeles Theatre, but I’ve been around enough to know that far too many companies are either vanity projects for one giant ego, giant balls of bickering or some other ugly little collection of neuroses (that’s what ACTORS are supposed to be.)

I say this so you know that when I say I love being with this cast, you will hopefully take it as something other than ‘what people always say.’ I don’t always say those things, but I really like these people.

I like the show, too, although I always have trouble discerning the ‘read’ - I’m pretty happy with the work I’m doing, everybody else is doing a good job, and Cecil’s a hell of a writer. The first review should come out this week or next, for what it’s worth. All in all, I expect this show to do well, artistically and otherwise.

Go see it. Right now. Well, not RIGHT now, but, you know, soon.

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I spent a good portion of Sunday at the Southern California Regional Bikram Yoga Championship, essentially by accident. Fun fact: Bikram is a dude.

I went along with Carla after rehearsal, in the interest of doing something I hadn’t done before. I need to get this out of the way right now, lest it give me a tumor: nothing in the world - nothing - can smell as bad as a giant room devoted to Bikram yoga. I don’t care how bad your bipedal snow cow smells, inside or out, this is worse. Apparently, they heat the room to 105 degrees for Bikram, which is oriented more towards strength and flexibility than other yogic disciplines. The room could probably hold, oh, 18,000 people. that’s 18,000 people bending and sweating in 105 degree heat. Hence the smell.

When I wasn’t wondering if my nose would shut down before I went into shock, I was admiring the competition. It works like so: each hopeful gets three minutes to perform seven poses (five compulsory, two they choose themselves.) The question of ‘competitive yoga’ was dealt with by explaining that, even though there were other people up there, it was still really about competing with one’s self. All I know is that the only pose I could have complete was the Rabbit, which could just as easily have been called the ‘Nap.’

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A couple of days ago, my shampoo bottle opened up inside my gym bag - especially irritating since, even though I live in a car and have extremely short hair, it’s expensive shampoo. Luckily, it managed to concentrate itself on my electronic equipment (gym radios; 1 for FM/AM, 1 for TV) which should weather the sudsy storm nicely. Sigh.

The panic moment came when I tried to clean the shampoo off of my combination lock and all the paint came off of the dial. It took me a minute or two of trying to figure out what the hell to do with a lock with no numbers before I realized that there were numbers imprinted into the metal. Catastrophe was, once again, averted.

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Westward Expansion opens tomorrow night at 8pm. There’s a link to the NowCasting page for it on the sidebar, as well as a link to the Alliance. $10

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This isn’t a political blog, but I want to point out once again the fact that the ability to hand power over from one party to another without bloodshed is still a relatively rare thing in the world. Regardless of your political persuasion, congratulations, America.

WESTWARD EXPANSION

Opens November 10th, runs Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays until December 19th

With special wackiness as 365 Plays runs. Closed Thanksgiving.

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This is Tech Week for Westward Expansion. If you don’t do theatre, tech week is supposed to be the time when the acting work is done and the lighting, sound and prop people take over. In reality, it’s usually that plus unfettered panic from just about everybody.

This always happens. That’s theatre.

This should be an interesting show; it has a lot going on, it melds experimental and conventional elements and it’s short - which should serve to enhance the aforementioned melding. The final week is going to run concurrently with the Susan-Lori Parks ‘365′ week for the Alliance, which means we run every night that week. I’m strangely excited about that. It makes me feel nostalgic for a time that I’m fairly sure never actually happened in my life.

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Don’t Gag Me!

We’ll shoot Carla’s movie December 3rd & 4th. It should be a ton of fun. The script is snappy and funny, and Carla’s hot as hell. The acting will, of course, be outstanding.

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Last night, whilst attending Brendan’s birthday celebration at the Whaler on Washington, an extremely drunk woman either fell or bent over a table at me. Lacking any other means of support, she latched onto my neck with fingernails that must have been eight inches long and made of adamantium. I’m not saying she hit my brain stem, but I can still smell colors. She said something that might have been angry and might have been erotic, but I was too busy not feeling anything to know for sure.

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NOTE: As I write this, I can hear a co-worker singing “Red, Red Wine” in the bathroom. Badly.

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I filmed my first scene last night - my first scene for the Dopler Effect, and my first non-pornographic scene ever, I think. I don’t want to say too much about it, but it was a fantastic experience. Well, it was for me; I can’t really speak for Aberto, who spent several hours tied up on the floor. Man, if I had a nickel for every time I’ve had to type THAT out….

It took around seven hours, but it wasn’t wasted time. We really got a lot done. I completely forgot to eat, surviving mainly on excitement and verve. I’m actually feeling pretty beat up today, but I can’t necessarily figure out why. The throat makes sense (there was a lot of screaming) but I’m not sure why my legs are so destroyed. Christ, maybe it was pornographic.

I have a lot of faith in what those guys are doing. I expect the series to be a lot of fun. Now I just have to fight that comedown you get after something like this. Luckily, Carla’s gearing up her film and Westward Expansion is right around the corner. It’s an important reminder, however, that a big chunk of life as an actor is the search for the next project, the Next Thing.
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I have some fun photos to toss up, including my favorite-thus-far juxtaposition of flyers taped to a phone booth, but I need to find my camera. I don’t think it’s really lost, I think I just need to do a little house-cleaning.

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