May 13th, 2009
Lying in Public
If you haven’t noticed, we are big fans of “This American Life” on public radio. I reference it from time-to-time. Well there is a infamous local “live” version of that in the Bay Area called Porch Light Storytelling. People basically run with a theme and tell a personal story based on that theme in ten minutes; live on stage. People from This American Life and authors as well as just your “person off the street” who submit stories and are accepted perform in this thing. Well, my wife was accepted and is telling her story TONIGHT!! The theme is about lying so it is right up her alley. 
I’m super proud of her and this is such a perfect forum for her type of humor and life stories it is uncanny. Plus she is nearly done with her first novel so this is good timing for networking and pushing her name out there for looking for agents, etc.
If you think you can make it on short notice here is the link. Read her Bio!
Break a leg you liar…
I just wanted to spend a post to thank everyone who supported the show (I just finished directing a local production of Sam Shepard’s True West, for those who didn’t know that). We closed it in late April and I had a wonderful time with a great cast and crew and design staff. It was a joy to be involved with and I really saw it as a stress-free “fun” thing to do each night. I especially want to thank my wife and daughter though. They felt the brunt of me being gone so much and I couldn’t have done that without them. Let alone Jen was the Producer for the show as well!
Yeah, community theatre can really become the cliche of a “Waiting for Guffman” mess sometimes, but this wasn’t the case for me this time. We were all proud of the thing and were sorry to see it go. That is one of my favorite things about the medium though…You Can’t Take it with You as they say. Once it is over the product is gone forever. Never to be seen again in that form. That is why the process itself is so important to me. I think we set out to have fun with it and we did just that. If there is a next time I can only hope we are lucky enough to repeat at least some of that fun.
The radio show episode is about a theatre director who goes into real prisons and does this last act of the play with actual prisoners over 6 months time. She auditions them, trains them, rehearses them and finally they perform. The wonderful thing about the show is that you can see over the course of the process how much they change in some profound ways. They make a great point that as many people as there have been who have played Hamlet over the years there is almost never an actor who has actually been a murderer. No one can really relate to this character at all. Except prison inmates. They are in many ways the perfect actors for this play. To hear them talk about their own analysis of the play and the characters and how it relates to their own life and wrong doings is quite profound (at least to me). Most of these guys have never been on stage let alone read Shakespeare. All levels of education and upbringing, etc. You can almost hear them being rehabilitated as the hour long radio show goes on. It just can’t be the case that our only solution for justice is to put someone in a cell for their entire life. I’m not saying I’m against the death penalty, but when you hear how these guys were affected by doing a simple thing like this play and how far they come over just 6 sporadic months of rehearsal, you begin to think that there must be many different forms of rehabilitation out there if we only thought more creatively. Yes, I’ll go ahead and say that it could be the “power of theatre” or some such nonsense, but you know, it kind of is.
