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In tech week now on Millwood Outpost, a new play at Playwrights Local. We started rehearsals in February and are rapidly approaching the finished product!

The rehearsal process has been fun, but things really got interesting for me when one of the actors had to drop out and I jumped in to replace him. Memorizing a part in your own script is an eye-opening experience, providing a level of insight of which I was completely unaware. It’s been a very long time since I acted, so there’s an element of fear and exhilaration involved in getting on stage again, but I’ve been supported by a great cast, a great director, a great stage manager, and a great artistic director who was completely behind the decision.

As I wrote above, we’re now in tech so it’s great to see the final touches on the set come together alongside the lights and sound, which really deepen and complement the words of the play and enhance its meaning. A big element of the play is sound. I was very intrigued by numbers stations, which I’m not entirely sure how I stumbled on in the first place. Numbers stations, for those who don’t know, appear to be radio stations that broadcast repeatedly with minor variation. Many suspect that they are messaging systems for spies in the field. They have an eerie, loneliness to them, a sense of isolation in space and time. In this particular instance, the Lincolnshire Poacher. Using the wonderful voice of Juliette Regnier, I modified the Lincolnshire Poacher broadcast for the messaging of my play. I had a great deal of fun creating the soundscapes for the various radio interludes. I had a great deal of fun gathering many of the set pieces as well. I wanted a set design that was bare, to emphasize the drama and, of course, to make the play easy to stage.

I’m looking forward to the run and hoping to see many friendly faces in the audience!

When I started out in playwrighting my exemplars where the traditional male canon of American theater: Eugene O’Neill, Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams; and I was escaping my personal background in undergraduate English, with its heavy accent on Shakespeare, Aphra Behn, John Gay, Molière, Ibsen, etc. It wasn’t until I started reading contemporary playwrights, including David Mamet and Sam Shepard that I realized that theater could be much, much more than the little that I had seen and read.

My first exposure was to Mamet, and his brand of hypermasculine posturing. Here I realized that the speech of characters in my plays could be street speech, every day speech, and it could be arranged rhythmically in iambs and punctuated with fuck yous.

Sam Shepard showed that plays could be stream of consciousness, have radical set designs, outlandish plots, and explore the ravaged landscape of the fevered mind. Plays like the Unseen Hand, Chicago, Cowboy #2, Rock Garden, Red Cross blew my mind when it came to the spontaneous shifts in character and action, the stark symbolism of the text, repetitive language cycles. And then I got to his bigger plays: Fool for Love, True West, Buried Child, Curse of the Starving Class, La Turista, etc. And here I saw displayed the full power of a playwright who had developed his own mythos and vision of the world. He took traditional plots and situations and suffused them with surreal events and behaviors that showed the raw unconscious pulsing just below the surface of the everyday. I knew I wanted to write like him.

Then there was the realization that I had seen him in films. Not even connecting the dots. When I was a kid I had watched his films on HBO: The Right Stuff, Raggedy Man… and then later, Thunderheart, Black Hawk Down, Bloodline. And having kids, heard a thousand times narrate the film Charlotte’s Web.

It was a hope of mine to meet him, but I’ll have to stick with his works, I guess. Sam Shepard was a unique talent, whose abilities were transcendent.