Category: Drama

November 29, 2003 /

Incidentally, the reason I’m posting at 0230 hrs on a morning when I have no business being up is because I just got back from teching the Project Improv (scripted) show, PI Sketch, available for your viewing ONE NIGHT ONLY in about fourteen hours. Anybody who doesn’t mind a little raunch with their humor should get there between 1830 and 2000 hrs and stay until 2200, as there will be a carnival with a duck pond, and also rock songs and jokes. I’m running sound.

Unrelatedly, I’m sick. And use too many adverbs.

October 18, 2003 /

I stood in the bathroom and I had to snap my fingers to get the automatic soap dispenser to ejaculate into my hand, and I was thinking about how the other people in the room all paid a thousand dollars to see this show, and I got in for free, and there we all were together, peeing.

I sat in row H of the lower balcony and watched the Gala Premier of The Lion King tour in Louisville, and it was really actually as good as it’s made out to be, even on tour. It’s stylistically and technically excellent, with the kind of transparency of production that I really admire and want to be able to do, someday.

I need to explain now how I got into this black-tie-only red-carpet Kentucky Center 20th Anniversary show, which is that I have Connections. And now I need to explain how I have said Connections, which is that I’ve been rehearsing for a few weeks with the Project Improv apprentices company (my life is filled with improv). I haven’t talked about it in here because I wasn’t really sure how far I wanted to go with it–acting’s not something in which I’m really interested at this point in my life, and I’ve never actually been very good at improv. Yet I keep coming back to rehearsals. I guess I’m kind of in.

The PI troupe proper, by and large, works in the Kentucky Center; their kindness and their comp tickets extend to their adopted apprentices, and so we ended up standing nervously and giggling in the middle of people with free food and champagne. I could have hit the mayor of Louisville (who currently wields considerably more power than, say, our governor) with a rock. I have no reason to hit him with anything, I’m just saying.

It was a good show, anyway, and I got to try out my fancy new black blazer for the first time. I didn’t really want to walk up the red carpet, lined with photographers and drummers and giant puppets, on the way in. But I did on the way out.

May 8, 2003 /

So I actually did it: Running on three hours of sleep, I wrote the ten-page culminating statement on My Theatre in three and a half hours, then presented it earlier tonight. And it was pretty good. I’m exasperated with myself for doing this yet again, but at the same time, I’m now fully convinced that I’m capable of flight and the picking up of cars.

I know there’s more to talk about, but I’m really too tired to be capable of rational discourse right now (even the paragraph above was written down on an envelope at around 4:00). But hey! New Guster!

May 5, 2003 /

Ultimate Frisbee is the new running. I get about the same workout, but it takes three times as long, and the whole affair is a lot dirtier. I also get to publicly embarrass myself, in that I (really, seriously) can’t throw or catch. On the plus side, I keep taking my falls on the same two places, so I bleed a lot!

Saturday night was the First Annual Drama Formal, and also the public debut of DJ Jazzy O’Badkins (that’s me). It was mostly cute little froshers, and they only stayed for maybe an hour of the allotted three, but at least they were there for tracks 6 – 18, what I consider the best part of the mix (on which I spent about six painstaking hours). You can see the HTML version if you want. Yes, I started it with Chumbawamba. I was being retro! I make no apologies! Nobody was there yet anyway!

My baby sister Caitlan, who wields the powers of all Adkinses combined, has decided to go to Georgetown, back in the little hamlet where we were all born. I still would have liked it if she’d picked Centre, but now I can say that our family has conquered all three important Kentuckian smallliberalartscolleges. O’Doyle rules!

April 24, 2003 /

Last night was the least stressful opening night I’ve ever been through, thanks largely to the way the stage is set up, I think. The musicians play behind what’s called a scrim at the back of the stage–a very loosely woven canvas that’s semitransparent straight onbut opaque from an angle. Because it makes the audience look fuzzy, it fosters the illusion that we’re behind some kind of two-way mirror and don’t have to worry about being watched. Even though I know consciously that the audience can see us just as well as we can see them, that still put me at ease enough to play as well as I ever have. This is neat!

It seemed to work pretty well for everyone else, too, and the music really sounded great. More credit for that goes to the writer than to us, but hey, he gets his bow too.

This is the big crunch week, in that I have no more free evenings to work until Sunday, and I’ve been struggling to keep up. I did finally get in an appointment to see my career counselor about a resume critique; we’d been having a little difficulty finding a time because, and I quote, “she’s got a mare due.” Only in Kentucky.

Anyway, she seemed to like my resume and my cover letter (the first one I’ve ever written!), so that felt good. It still bemuses me, though, how little one’s qualifications matter compared to the monumental importance of making them all fit on one page. My counselor’s a nice lady, but I honestly think she knows as much about line spacing and margins as she does about, y’know, jobs.

Another thing I’m behind on: sending out graduation announcements. Eek. I went to the library yesterday to copy pages out of my mother’s address book, which is kind of like a library in itself. There are sheaves of apocryphal driving directions, notes and updates, about five different styles of handwriting, and some entries that take up half a page alone because they’ve been crossed out and corrected so many times. It’s a fascinating object, and I feel like I should get a grant and do an archaeological dig on it.

Too many things on my head. Why is everyone getting sick? Should I bleach my hair again? And how the hell am I supposed to wrap up this entry?

April 9, 2003 /

Entry 255! I have almost a whole byte’s worth of journal!

Every time I start to get uppity about something I’m doing at school, dramatic irony thwops me on the forehead. Like, for example, the past couple of weeks have been the beginning of music rehearsals for the spring production of Chalk Circle. That means, thanks to the grand tradition of Brendan’s Roommates Letting Him Pretend He’s A Musician, I’ve been actually reading things on sheets of music and playing them on congas with a band of real musicians. This honestly gives me the shivers.

Then, just as I’m starting to believe something like “hey! this stuff can be learned,” along comes Wynton Marsalis.

I only got to watch the first third of the show (two hours), but everything I saw was… well, pretty much what you’d expect from Wynton Marsalis’s band, assuming you know who Wynton Marsalis is. I don’t even think I enjoyed it as much as some of the other people watching it up on the catwalk with me, because I honestly don’t have a developed taste for jazz. I was still in awe. The talent and skill those guys put on display was ineffable.

That said, today was the first day I ran my whole route–what I guess now is around three miles–without stopping to walk. I haven’t done that since high school, and I did both on rainy days, and there’s really no dramatic irony possible there. No matter how many people run better than me, the fact is that right now I can run as fast as I ever have in my life.

March 6, 2003 /

I kind of forgot to mention this, but I’m in Virginia. SETC again, and the 24-Hour Playfest again, and I’ve just finished the third draft of my play, which is pretty close to final. I’m an hour early, which may mean that (end-of-the-world joke of your choice).

I’ve got enough caffeine in me to power a small country for a week, so I need to be doing something or I’ll be fidgeting and bothering the senior playwright who’s going over my piece right now: thus the entry. I’m as nervous as I was last year, because there’s no safety net. Doing comedy is hard, but writing tragedy is harder, and I think I wrote a tragedy. Or at least something that hurts.

Tony called me out last year for only writing comedy; he said he thought I had it in me to write deeper, darker stuff. I don’t believe my comedies have any less depth just because their tone is different, but the challenge irked me anyway. They do that. So this year I wrote something with a bite to it. It’s the play I couldn’t write fall term, and if you were around you know what that means, and if you read the play you might figure it out.

Or you might not. I have to edit now, I think. I don’t want the ending to feel tagged on, especially because it wasn’t.

February 14, 2003 /

I’m so tired it should be visible: there should be waves of it rising off me, distorting the air like our old wood-burning stove.

Last night was the second and last public performance of The Laramie Project. The Fellowship of One, the group of (mostly, and oddly, black) local pastors who have been trying to stop us from doing the play at the high school, were in attendance. They’ve never been uncivil, but their arguments at such venues as the DHS parents’ meeting have consisted mostly of things like

Pastor: The play promotes a homosexual lifestyle.
Teacher: The play doesn’t promote any such thing. It shows viewpoints from all sides, including Christian values like mercy and forgiveness, and it shows what happens to people when a crime forces them to confront the issue of prejudice in their community. This is why we’re teaching it as part of our curriculum during Black History Month.
Pastor: The play promotes a homosexual lifestyle!

Last night, they left after the second act. Jeff, our director, ran out after them and asked what they’d thought of the show. Only one of them would speak to him, but what he said was

“This is a play about not hating people. You’ve made your point.”

We did it. We did it right.

Exhaustion, and triumph, and a ring around the moon.

February 12, 2003 /

Collective effervescence.

We’ve started the play, and it’s perfect, raw, gorgeous, exactly everything we wanted it to be.

Afterwards, I walked to the gas station to buy more caffeine (the presentation has yet to be done). I had a flower in my backpack from Deb, and was listening to a Duncan Sheik song, of all things, and I could see the whole scope of it: how last year was home, and this year is setting out away from it. How and why I’ve done what I’ve done, here. How this is the biggest year I’ve ever lived.