The Plan

A big chunk of Alliance members attended the Valley League Theatre Awards (called, for some reason which I do not care to research, the A.D.A’s) last night, where as far as can be determined the company finished an incredibly close second in every category where we were nominated. There was a surprising amount of overlap between presenters, League board members and winners (not that I’m suggesting anything….) but it’s pretty cool that the company picked up as many noms as they did in what seems to be a pretty insular little club. The ceremony ran longer than it should have (Fred and Mary Willard hosted entertainingly, although as the evening wore on their patience seemed to wear out) but it was nice to see everybody and hang out with the Kids.

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So I’m trying to be good about…pretty much everything, at least in terms of my general physical health. This past weekend marked the first time in my life where I could suddenly fit into something that was too small when I bought it. The downside is that I’ve given up so many bad habits and such over the past two years (and, let’s face it, I’m pretty addicty) that when things get tough I get all sorts of cravings. Not so much for alcohol, definitely for cigarettes and pills and stuff. With food I go the other way, and decide that instead of eating a burger I won’t eat anything. For a few days at least, then the burger

But I’m realizing now that the worst, most dangerous cravings aren’t for food or drugs, they’re for people. Insane cravings for absolutely the worst possible people. Damned if I know why.

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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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I woke up in the middle of one of those dreams that are so soft and sweet that an extra hour of sleep would feel like the most precious gift. Even in a car.

Of course it was about her. One of her, at any rate.

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I realize now that I’m just sort of moody, but I’m really hoping to develop it into full-on brooding.

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A strange happening in the night: I was awakened around 3-ish by the sound of shouty fighting right outside my window. This was odd, because my window is a driver’s side Toyota window, which placed the shouting directly in the street. The combatants were a couple who were allegedly attempting to park.

So the guy opens his door and bangs my car. I’m sure this happened in the service of some subtle dialectic point which I couldn’t quite hear from right next to him. He didn’t hit the car that hard (and if you’ve seen the left side of my car, then you know it would be undetectable visually) so I didn’t really do anything about it.

So dude storms off, leaving chick to parallel park behind me. I would never traffic in stereotypes, but god DAMN girls can’t parallel park. She hit my rear bumper three times. Again, between my sleepiness and the fact that she wasn’t hitting me very hard, I decided not to worry about it. After all, the last thing I need to do is start an angry discussion that will sooner or later include the disclosure that I live in the damn thing. I have a feeling that will generally suck up most of my credibility.

The thing is, it would have been really funny if I had come screaming out of that thing as soon as they woke me up, blankie a-flappin’ in the wind, screeching some automotive equivalent of ‘you kids get off my lawn!’ Ha ha!

I would have been shot so many times.

At the very least, I’m getting in on the ground floor:

Living in a car now touted as a plus

The Fark.com discussion where I am no doubt about to be eviscerated.

There’s gotta be a way I can peel some money outta this…..

Yeah, that’s right. It’s a Backstreet Boys lyric. Don’t mess with me.

First things first: I auditioned a few weeks ago for a sci-fi thing that I heard about through my friend Emma (if you saw Anniversary at the Alliance, she was the Princess and a fetus….that’s a phrase I never expected to type.) I found out a few days ago that I’m in, and while I have very little in the way of details, I’m extremely excited. There’s a link on the side where you can check out the trailer. Emma’s the one who’s going to teach you about DARPA.

Carla’s script for the short looks sweet, but I don’t want to say too much. She wants to have the thing shot by the end of November, so that one looks to be firing up pretty quick here as well. She’s linked on the side there, too. Yeah, she’s gorgeous.

Westward Expansion has made the transition from a WIP to a play. I’m really happy with how it’s going, and we still have a ton of time. It’s going to be a lot of fun. Cecil’s writing that one and it’s opening at the Alliance on November 9th - both the Alliance and Cecil are over there on the side. The sidebar is pretty much the place to be.

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I’ve been talking a lot with friends and colleagues about why we pursue this nonsense career. I still feel like there’s something noble in coming out here and doing this, mainly because I don’t see the goal of life as a game with a scoreboard. The point is just to live, not to score goodie-two-shoes helpy points or own a bunch a stuff - and we give up a lot of security to pursue this silly life. Don’t worry, I’m also aware that it’s kind of dark and uniformly selfish. These things aren’t necessarily limited to acting or the industry, but dammit, I don’t know everything.

I see three types of people out here: first are those who ‘know’ they can do it. I put myself in that category - nobody else can, you either feel it or you don’t. I could be wrong, obviously, but that isn’t the point. The point is that I’ll keep at it forever because I know I can and if I don’t I’ll be dead eventually anyway.

Category two is those who don’t have that rock-hard certainty, but plug at it anyway. This describes most people out here, I think. Basically it’s ‘normal.’ People who don’t get what they want out of the industry and say ‘the hell with it, I’m going to law school’ are twos.

Category three is people who just don’t have the heart. I don’t know if they know it or not, but after a while it becomes clear to the rest of us. I worry about them. They can still make it, but it won’t do them much good - Kurt Cobain would be in this category.

It’s not particularly important to me to have categories except in how it helps me define myself in relation to others (see? selfish.) Why do I ‘know’ I can make it?

I’m incredibly insecure, and I’m also extremely arrogant. My current theory is that the former applies to who I AM and the latter to what I DO. Somewhere in the collision between the two, in the swirling interior nexus where my need for love and approval fights it out with my talent and the work I’m willing to do, there’s an answer.

For now, this illustrates where I am: I get people thinking they recognize me all the time. Sometimes they tell me that I look just like somebody they know. Sometimes I’ll be at a bar or something and hear people trying to figure out if they’ve seen me in something (they haven’t.) Sometimes I’ll walk by someone on the street and I’ll see that double-take and know they’re wondering if they know me.

And what I think to myself is: Wait a year. You will.

The cooler has been quite the little boon. The ability to keep milk on hand is enabling me to continue my controlled starvation (thanks, Slim Fast!) longer than I would have thought. It’s also been a rather unfortunate reminder of some basic rules of physics and chemistry.

Originally, the cooler lived in the trunk wrapped tightly in a blankie. The idea was to insulate the thing so that my ice would last as long as possible. What actually happens is that the cooler pees on everything.

Ok, not really, but I will say that if any little children out there need ideas for a science fair project involving the production of astonishing and completely uncontrollable levels of condensation they should contact me immediately. Or not. I don’t really like kids.

The cooler will live in the backseat for now, because a river can run through whatever it wants as long as it doesn’t end up in my trunk. I’m thinking about sectioning off a part of the backseat to sort of hide the thing, but there’s a Monster Garage/Pimp My Ride level that I would prefer not to hit. Sooner or later, I would electrocute myself.

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I realize I’m losing my mind from time to time. I’ll try to develop a schedule and stick to it. You know, so we’ll all be on the same page.

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I still have a lot of cool things I’m waiting on performy-wise. Everything sounds good so far, but I’m basing that on astonishingly tiny amounts of information.