Carv's Thinky Blog I'm an author with a focus on satirical science fiction.

The Game Is Afoot!

It was important to me to publicize the play I'm directing in as many unusual ways as I could, so I'm trying my hand at puzzle construction. Our show is called Sherlock's Last Case, and it's a non-canonical adventure from the annals of Sherlock Holmes. It occurred to me that what Mr Holmes did best was solve puzzles.

Now, I've been a cruciverbalist for as long as I can remember, meaning I love crossword puzzles. When I was a kid I created crosswords for fun, but they were never the symmetric square variety so familiar from your daily newspaper--because it turns out those are really, really hard to devise. Perhaps my adult brain would be up for the challenge? When the idea for a puzzle contest grew in my noggin, I resloved to start it off with a real, honest to Will Shortz, legitimate crossword puzzle, then progress through a series of word games, once per week till opening week. John Munn, the artistic manager of Lakewood Playhouse (and Dr Watson in our production), thought this was a marvelous idea, and he signed on immediately. The winner gets free tickets to opening night, plus a laurel and hearty handshake. Or something like that. Anyway, here's the contest:

Baker Street Irregulars Conundrum of Clues

Solve each week's puzzle, and it'll generate a one-word clue related to Sherlock Holmes. Once you have all the weekly clues, the final puzzle will show you how to use them to generate the single-word solution to the contest. Give it a shot! It's my first time attempting such a thing, so I'm curious what word puzzle fans like myself will make of it.

Best of luck!

Update: The second week's puzzle has been posted. It's a wordoku!

Have fun!

The Play’s the Thing

Much to my surprise, the Fifty Shades diatribe below took off like a rocket over the weekend. I suspect Davee Jones's efforts on Twitter had rather a lot to do with that, but whatever the explanation, I appreciate it. The entry became one of my most widely shared and, apparently, enjoyed pieces yet. I was so delighted with the response that I've avoided updating this site, for fear of burying its hottest item! That I'm doing so today should put this entry into greater perspective.

After decades of hardcore theatre life, I still consider Hamlet the richest example of dramatic writing ever achieved in English or, quite possibly, any other language. (The book of Job is right up there.) I was honored to direct a bare bones incarnation of it a few years ago, and now director Austen Anderson of Animal Fire Theatre has allowed me to fulfill a lifelong dream by casting me as Claudius, Hamlet's deeply conflicted new stepfather. We open tonight in Priest Point Park in Olympia. The show starts at 7:00 p.m., it runs about 125 minutes with no intermission, and it's absolutely free. You can see it any Thursday, Friday, Saturday, or Sunday night for the next three weekends.

There's a restroom nearby, and we're told it'll be open. Bring a lawn chair. Bring Deep Woods Off. Bring a picnic basket full of goodies (no drugs or alcohol, please--at least until cast party night). Some people even bring their dogs, though I really wish you wouldn't. They're distractingly cute.

I know, you know how Hamlet ends. (You do, right?) But do you recall how it gets there? Sure, that "to be or not to be" soliloquy is familiar all over the planet, but do you understand why? Do you know why it's the coolest speech ever?

Do you know how Jay Minton will portray Hamlet's "antic disposition?" Do you know what makes Claudius tick? Will Ophelia be bonkers, or just a bit miffed? How does it change things when Horatio is played by a woman? Does it make William Shakespeare seem like more of a chauvinist d-bag? What's up with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern--and furthermore, who names their kids Rosencrantz or Guildenstern? How often were those guys beat up in grade school?

I usually don't tell anybody I'm in shows unless I think they're good. I'm funny that way. As of last week, this one really took off. You should see it. I promise you, it'd be a steal at two hundred times the price.

...Math humor! That always kills! Take that, "Fifty Shades of Crap!"

Coming…May 18th…

Ooh, this show looks intense! You go, Olympia Family Theater!

P.S.: Okay, well, OFT's trailer is pretty good, too...

...but I still like mine better.

Not-So-Bel Canto

If nothing else, this last month has taught me the difference between humility and self-loathing. I auditioned for a musical in Lakewood and made callbacks. Great. I really wanted to be in this particular musical, because I love the director and would be surrounded by many pretty girls and hilarious men. In short, it looked to be a reprise of my wonderful Frost/Nixon experience from last year. But as the day of the callback neared, I grew ever more worried, because I'd be asked to sing and dance. That makes sense, of course, but I'm sorry to say I've amassed a shoddy track record in these pursuits. In college, I got cast several times as Basil Exposition, who would come in for one scene to explain the plot, then shuffle offstage while the rest of the cast came out and demonstrated how fabulous they were for the remainder of the show.

I'm humble about my singing ability. I can carry a tune, and I've been known to impress the uninformed in short stretches. My musically-gifted friends in Oklahoma insist I have nothing to feel humiliated about. Nonetheless, when I open my mouth to sing a note near the edges of my bass-baritone range, I know there's a fair chance it might come out sounding like the results of a basset hound getting caught in a bear trap.

Between you and me and that fence post over there, I think I did okay in my singing audition. I hit all the notes I planned to, and in roughly the intended order. Then the dance audition started.

I feel self-loathing about my dancing ability.

Here's the difference: with singing, I know I'm not great, but I also know I could improve. I could work on my ability to sight-read, which is limited. I could train with professionals to master breathing techniques and projection to the back of the hall. I could educate myself in music theory; there are awesome free websites to help with this. I could rehearse more at home, and in my estimation, the time would be well spent. I could train myself to be a better singer. I see minor improvements every day.

But with dancing, no matter what I do or how hard I train, I will never be worth the cost of a snowflake in Iceland. I know that, because in 43 years, I've never once demonstrated so much as a picosecond of natural ability. It's amazing I can walk, Gentle Reader. My Dance Dance Revolution will never be televised, because I have the grace of a losing move in Jenga. My best attempts at terpsichorean elegance look about like that OK Go treadmill video would if it were performed by Blues Traveler on a tequila bender. I'm not good.

I felt the awful tonnage of self-loathing on my shoulders before the dance audition even began. Once it started, I wanted to crawl into a naked singularity and implode. I tried to stand near people I thought would be as clumsy as I, but miscalculated and wound up next to the Pilates instructor and part-time pole dance enthusiast instead. This was analogous to entering Steve Buscemi in a Miss America pageant.

About once every decade, I get cast in a dance show anyway, and when I express my deep concerns the choreographer inevitably chirps, "You've never worked with me!" Two months later, that choreographer is just as inevitably dead of self-inflicted gunshot wounds or off somewhere in a home for the special.

Shockingly, I didn't get cast in that Lakewood musical. Instead, I volunteered to join the chorus for a three-company production of Verdi's immortal La Traviata. Luckily, this production has no dancing, so I was able to relax a bit and enjoy the first few choral rehearsals. It became obvious quickly that the director was sorely in need of male soloists, but even so, I was stunned when she asked me to play a brief role as the Baron. I almost said no, but when she told me the role had been reduced to two lines, I swallowed my panic and promised I'd give it the old college try.

Those two little lines of recitative took me three full hours of rehearsal to sing acceptably. Were they out of my range? No. Were they in a weird time signature? Nope. They are in Italian--well, fine, I know some of those phonetics from a lifetime of menu perusal. The real problem was the nature of opera singing. The 19th-century Italian opera requires a style called bel canto, or "beautiful singing," to project with any shred of appeal over a full and enthusiastic orchestra. Vowels are rounder, consonants are shorter, whole sentences are blended into what sound like single words, and everything is slathered in vibrato. I'm not terrific at it, honestly, but I got to the point where I could sing "Vi conosco da un anno soltanto" and "M'è increscioso quel giovin" without drowning in flop sweat.

"This guy's pretty good," the lead tenor and co-director announced, effectively making my year. "And you're a director, too? We could use you!" Even better. "In fact," he continued, rubbing his chin thoughtfully, "we should also cast you as the Doctor."

Uh...whatchu talkin' 'bout, Alfredo?

The Doctor has several more lines, in the key of Eb which, for some reason, is kicking my ass Balaam style. He also appears in the final quintet. I'm still a member of the chorus as well, but at least I weaseled out of memorizing all that material; the chorus is carrying songbooks. Don't get me wrong. It's not like this show rests on my shoulders. I could be a miserable train wreck and 99.7% of the opera would remain unaffected. But it's a new challenge for me, one I'm doing my best to meet with a positive attitude. I know how lousy I am, but I'm trying to get better. That's humility. As for dance auditions, you'll see me at one of them again, oh, sometime around 2019, just long enough for the choreographer to realize I look like a mine collapse set to music. That's self-loathing.

Amanda, on the other hand? She's terrific. Her undergraduate education was in operatic singing, and she's holding her own with the finest bel canto professionals in the South Sound. It's a pleasure to watch her blowing the doors off her own wheelhouse. Last night the lead tenor told her they'd be using her again in the future. More than anything else, that made the whole La Traviata experience one of the most rewarding I've enjoyed in recent years. Break a leg, babe. You've earned it.

As for me, I'm one rehearsal and an insane panic of a single performance away from hanging up my opera tux for the foreseeable future. But when that's in the can, I've been asked to audition for one of my all-time bucket list roles, in a Shakespeare production that goes up opposite that musical in Lakewood. So hey, maybe Thespis had a different plan for me: all talking, no dancing, no singing, pretty girls. That's the genre I like best.

Losing My Religion

If you're a churchgoing person, then I bet there was a time when you felt inflamed in the spirit. (Maybe that time is now.) You were a recent convert, or maybe you finally came of age and started to understand the faith of your childhood. Your religion was a source of instant joy and comfort. You were part of a family. You knew the rules, and you liked them, and you were ready to dive in headfirst.

I never really felt that way about my own Christianity, no matter how hard I tried through my teen years. But when I saw Mr. David Schallhorn's spring 1989 production of The Glass Menagerie, I knew my future. I'd done theatre before, even made it to the State Finals in Oklahoma interscholastic acting tournaments, but until one perfect moment at the end of the first act, I was a mere hobbyist. When the lights fell on a perfect tableau, I was devastated. I GOT IT. This was how theatre could and should be. It grabbed me by the soul and screamed truth in my face. It challenged me to wrestle my angels and win transcendent blessings from on high. I discovered my calling.

All through undergrad college at ECU, I lived on stage. Everything else was just a warm-up. I couldn't dance, I couldn't sing all that well, but I could make an audience explode into hysterics by reading a phone book. For a Witness kid from Crowder, Oklahoma, this was revelatory. I could make grown men weep with a dip of my chin. Hell, I thought I was the Baron of Cool. And even if that was mostly just me surfing on a wave of self-delusional bravado, it worked. For a few golden years, I was a star. That was my house, and no one could touch me.

Then came grad school. I ran into a professor I'll call K. K was easily one of the smartest, most knowledgeable people I ever met; and believe me, Gentle Reader, that is saying something. He taught me lessons about acting and directing I will never forget, deep insights I quote frequently fifteen years later. He was also, or it seemed this way to me at the time, a complete lunatic. I'm pretty sure he had a drinking problem. I know he left weird notes in my mailbox. Some students were genuinely scared of him. Others worshiped him, even as he lurked around their houses. He was allowed to resign two years later in lieu of firing, and as I left that university, so did he--failing upward, to one of the best regarded drama schools in the American Ivy League. I learn from Google he's moved to another program since then; but he's still working in theatre education, and a few years ago, he won a major award for teaching. Good for him. Believe it or not, I mean that. Whatever demons he faced, I'm glad he was able to slay them (apparently), for God knows he had plenty to teach.

I remember the day he explained a liminal space. To a psychologist or philosopher, a liminal space is a point in spacetime at which an individual stands on the brink of deep personal transformation. The stage, K murmured, is such a place, and so is a church. It's a sacred space where we all agree as a culture that the rules can change unpredictably. When I walk on stage, my boundaries expand. I'm free to get furiously angry or fall in love with someone who isn't my girlfriend or laugh at the abject pain of a child or cry for the clown with a pie in his face. (To be sure, K explained, it's just as important to remember the rules change back the moment an actor leaves. Forget that at your peril, he warned, and he was right.) That made sense to me. In an even deeper way than the Greeks may have imagined, the stage became my holy place.

K taught me true professionalism and self-discipline. He taught me there's a right way to do things and a hundred thousand wrong ways, all of which were tried long ago and found wanting. He taught me how to be real on stage, meaning really myself, feeling dramatic pain in my core, truly suffering as the sacrificial lamb of catharsis. He taught me I was one semiquaver in a grand historic symphony that stretched from stories around campfires in caves to the million lights of Broadway.

Unfortunately, K also taught me to be so hypercritical of myself that it burned nearly every thread of joy from what had once been the love of my life. Or maybe it wasn't his fault after all. Maybe it was mine. Maybe my failed marriage (1998) or my grand disillusioning tour of the movie and TV businesses were responsible. Oh, who knows? I can't blame K for everything. He's still living the theatre life. He still feels the old joy.

Which is not to say I never enjoy theatre. On the contrary; I often adore it while I'm sitting with the audience watching it. I dig directing and sometimes even theatre gossip (aka foolishness). I still feel that old familiar actors' enthusiasm for isolated minutes in performance. But there's no question about it, there hasn't been enough joy in my work these last few years to compete with all the minor annoyances and inconveniences of a life in the thespian arts. Will that change, I wonder? Is it something I need to fight through, or have all those years of book-larnin' conspired to rob me of the thrill of my religion? These days I'm usually just going through the motions, and I have to say I miss the old fire.

If not theatre, then what? If not an actor's life, then whose? Who am I without the quest that inspired me? Who am I without my favorite religion?

I read somewhere that any time Jack Lemmon went on stage or stepped in front of a camera, he first whispered to himself, "Magic time." I adopted his habit years ago. I truly want to feel that magic again. Having it close all those years was one of the finest things about being me, and probably about knowing me as well.

Everyone’s a Critic!, Part 3

"Why do I even bother? Who reads theatre reviews, anyway? Should you? If my review says a show is bad but you think it sounds like fun, should you go see it anyway? Okay, but what if your cousin is in it? And now that local companies are announcing their 2010-2011 seasons, which upcoming shows look most promising?"--from Part 1

It's my considered opinion that most Americans have never seen a great play production. They probably saw a play in junior high or high school, but not a professional production. Now, there are plenty of highly trained directors and other theatre practitioners working in secondary schools, but they're usually not given much of a budget, so the results are undistinguished. It's hard to buy a fifteen-year-old in the role of King Lear or even Claudius, and few teenage actors can play Shakespeare worth a damn anyway. Looking around community theatre performances in Washington and Oklahoma, I saw a lot of gray hair; most young people can't afford the cost of a traveling Broadway production. And why should they, really? They've grown up attending movies for a tenth of the price, and it's hard to imagine a drowsy production of Our Town seducing their attention from pr0n and World of Warcraft.

Yet theatre matters, for the same reason a killer rock concert matters: It will never be repeated exactly the same way, and you are there. It's the biggest reason I'm a proponent of Meisner-style acting. In a Meisner show, performances vary from night to night. They're alive. They're exciting. You can watch those shows again and again and have a different experience every time. It's also why I prefer more intimate theatre venues of two hundred seats or less. A show like Wicked or Les Miz is so precisely orchestrated--for necessary musical, technical, and safety reasons--that it's like watching Audio-Animatronic figures at Disneyland. They never budge from their appointed intonations.

[P.S.: And sometimes I'm just wrong. My friend Michelle writes:

"I definitely beg to differ on the big shows not being unpredictable. They are carefully orchestrated, sure, but I GUARANTEE that after almost 15 years of working on them, I can safely say they are ALWAYS unpredictable and you never know what you will see each night. It's still live theatre and the actors and crew bring something different to it every time. Plus there's the time that the turntable just doesn't work, and that's always fun to see! I have seen many shows over 500 times and it's a different show every night."

Cheerfully retracted, Michelle. I may just be jealous of people who can afford to see those big traveling shows! They only play once, so I don't have a convincing reason to review them. But hey, Washington Center, if you want to throw me pairs of comps out of the goodness of your collective heart...]

Live theatre, even the big-budget shows, is hard pressed to compete with the spectacle of a summer popcorn movie, and I'm not convinced it should even try. Theatre specializes in the immediacy of human interaction. There's just something about being a fly on the wall when characters get urgently human with each other. Of course, it's hard to deny a stage full of high-kicking chorus girls can still take our breath away; but for the most part, what brings me and so many others back to live performance after all these millennia is the idea that we might witness (or, if I'm onstage, hopefully do) something completely unpredictable and riveting. When it happens, it's overwhelmingly electric, as much so as any other form of entertainment--and that includes sports and music.

So yes, you should care about theatre. We're lucky to have so much of it here. But it's also important for you to take time to find productions you're likely to enjoy before you attend. Consider this: At some point you had your first bowl of pho, plate of rogan josh, or bite of hamachi sushi. What if it'd been terrible? I mean, what if you hadn't done your research and went to a horrible restaurant, maybe even an expensive one, and the food was disgusting? You'd probably never eat those dishes again. I worry about people who grew up having to suffer through godawful theatre--wooden acting, apathetic directing, outdated scripts they couldn't possibly relate to or even understand. I get why they're loath to go back. After all, the movies are awesome, and cable TV is cheap!

That, Gentle Reader, is where I come in.

As I say, I'm not the sole arbiter of taste. I've probably given a positive review to a show you'd think was so-so at best, and someday I'm likely to knock a show you found enjoyable. Such is life. Art's subjective. But I'm informed and educated enough to know mistakes when I see them, and I can usually see the greatness in a show that possesses it. I might like good Shakespeare more than you, musicals less, but I can point you in a direction you're more likely to enjoy than many others. I'm on your side. My job, above all else, is that of consumer advocate.

No matter what I say, of course, you're mostly likely to see a show your friend or family member is in. That's both good and bad. It's good because you have a vested interest in the success of the show. (I saw the Roland Emmerich remake of Godzilla at a premiere screening with hundreds of people who worked on it; they cheered their ever-lovin' brains out, and I got caught up in the excitement. It was only an hour later that it dawned on me how abysmal that movie truly was.) We all enjoy watching friends perform, especially if they're any kind of talented--and there's the problem. They may not be. As you attend more and more theatre, you'll come to notice actors and even directors whose work you really admire. Once that happens, you'll have a personal interest in their shows, too. It's fun to be a fan. I look forward to seeing any number of actors in Olympia (Dennis Rolly, Pug Bujeaud, Jason Haws, Robert McConkey, and Megan Kappler, to name just a few), and I'm gradually coming to know the directors. I also have favorites in Oklahoma.

If I knock a show, and you still want to see it, by all means go. Theatre companies have to pay their bills, and your attendance at a mediocre show means its parent company can afford to produce the next good one.

I often wonder who reads my reviews, and the comments pages online don't provide a clear picture. If I have to guess, it's mostly the people involved with the shows themselves, looking for public flattery. There's nothing wrong with that. I do it myself. As Noel Coward said, "I love criticism, just so long as it's unqualified praise." But I've noticed even my most positive reviews fail to satisfy some actors and directors, in that the praises should have been longer.

The bulk of our South Puget theatre season will wind down by late June; the next ramps up in the fall. I think TAO will have fun with Edward Albee's The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia? in September. Prodigal Sun's doing How I Learned to Drive, Paula Vogel's morally complex take on an incestuous relationship, in November. Both Capital Playhouse and Paradise Theatre in Gig Harbor will stage The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee in early 2011. And next spring will be packed with great material, including Love, Sex, and the IRS (OLT), Boom, Unexpected Tenderness (both Harlequin), Kiss of the Spider Woman (Capital Playhouse), and Amy's View (Prodigal Sun).

Hope to see you there!