Tag: drama

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What goes into a show? OR, how much is a free wedding dress worth?

Regarding set, props, and costumes for The Ugly Princess.  Over the last few weeks, I have been picking up, transporting, or even storing in my car, the following:

  • a green velvet Renaissance dress
  • 6 wooden boxes, custom built by Doug Verdin for A Hate Story in 2012
  • “gold” tableware – goblets, cutlery and dishes
  • one rubber chicken
  • fake feathers (black and white)
  • 2 collapsible tables, different types
  • one blue satin dress
  • one fluttery white blouse
  • one production manager/designer/builder/life-saver
  • a wedding dress

Here’s how the last one came about.

With this play, I threw caution to the wind.  It’s a relatively big cast (5 actors), it’s meant to take place in a dilapidated, but still-royal residence, the characters are wearing fairy-tale-like costumes, and ONE character is a vain, selfish clothes-horse — she has TWO costume changes in a one-act show.  The green dress is mine.  Our actress Mandy loves costumes and has no issue acquiring new items, so she found the blue dress and blouse at Value Village.  But — SPOILER ALERT — the script (and I wrote it, so yes, it’s my own doing) calls for the character to appear in a wedding dress at one point.  Even with scouring thrift shops and the web, anything I could find which was remotely appropriate was running into the hundreds of dollars.  Oh, I’m also producing the show. That is:  I’m the money.  Ha ha.

Then lightning struck: I found a wedding gown on Kijiji, being given away – FREE.  It was the right size, and it wasn’t hideous!  I told my co-workers, who speculated about why someone would just give away a wedding dress.  Hey, I’m a writer, but in this case I don’t care WHAT the story is.

As always though, there was an ever-so-slight catch. As with most things Kijiji, I would have to pick up the dress myself. I had also arranged to fetch the boxes from director Maria that night.  Here, in text messages with my production manager Adam, is how the evening went:

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Here, I drove to the south end of town, which took about 30 minutes.

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HE DID NOT CALL 911.  He told me later he called the complaints line!

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Moral: every girl should have a stage manager who will flip out if she goes AWOL. But beware, he WILL flip out!

 

 

 

 

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I’m writing a play in 18 hours or less!

I can’t do it in 24 hours, because I work until 5 pm.

Yes, the 2nd Annual Writeathon begins at noon tomorrow!  Last year’s was…bonkers.  Fellow writers made velcro out of their beards and resorted to lacing of warm drinks (and then just tossing the mix altogether and drinking straight out of the mickey).  Oh, and we all did some writing and raised some (a crapload) of money to keep Alberta Playwrights Network ticking.

I haven’t been flogging the Writeathon at all.  With this two months ago, and flareups of this, I’ve been lying low. Now, however, I’m going to write out the beast that is endometriosis and kick it across the room.  I am re-writing It Started With an Allergy from beginning to end, and one way or another, I’m performing it (me!) at next summer’s Edmonton Fringe.  If you’d like to see it, feel free to visit HERE.

I’ll see you when I come down from the caffeine high.

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the Ugly Princess cometh!

I actually have PLAY NEWS.

The play I wrote at APN’s Writeathon, which I’ve been babbling about since last September, will get its first, full, public reading!

Ladies and gentlemen, it’s The Ugly Princess!!

It’ll be at Script Salon, put on by APN and PGC:

Holy Trinity Anglican Church, 10037 84 Ave NW, Edmonton, AB
Google Map
7:30 pm on Sunday, 3 August.

AND HERE’S THE CAST

I’m a wee bit excited.

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A kick in the butt, and I’m rethinking my life. Yes, again.

I’m going to try – and fail – to describe the Dramaworks workshop I was at for the last five days. Investigative Theatre, 35 hours in total, with Vladimir Shcherban, Associate Director of Belarus Free Theatre.

I knew very little about BFT before this. I had heard they’d done shows the government of Belarus didn’t like them doing, that some of their members had been arrested, and that they’d won several awards, including a Fringe First.

During those five days, I saw videos of two of BFT’s shows. (OH MY GOD, there aren’t words to describe how fantastic they are!). I acted out the days of the week, and got told “Good try” (after which I wrote in my notebook Don’t be hurt!). I sculpted my most horrible secret in plasticine (and everyone else got the feeling behind it), I took photos to show “Edmonton’s pain”, I filled my notebook with what Vlad said, and my own ideas for my solo show. He kept saying Бетон сітуацыя! – Concrete Situation! – that we each needed to get into what we wanted to show the audience, or else it would be dishonest. He talked about how it’s best and strongest to NOT talk, to find the object, the smell, the sound that would involve the audience – you’re not telling the audience anything, you are drawing them in. He said British theatre is wonderful…but they talk too much (!). The words are wonderful, but why do you have a body?

I came home every night to do my homework (lots), with my brain feeling like scrambled squid. And one thought in my scrambled brain…MORE, good enough isn’t good enough, MORE!

Rather than feeling inadequate and hopeless, I felt SMART, I felt yes, I’m right, I am still doing this!!

I also thought – and this is going to take a LOT of work – that I have to stop being afraid.

So yeah. It was farking amazing.

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Have you ever been so depressed you forgot to be happy?

Since I’ve blogged about my endometriosis, and I had a minor revelation this weekend, it may be time to talk about my clinical depression. Yes, I’m a bag of laughs.

Once again, I have no idea how long I’d officially been depressed. I was diagnosed by my GP in 2001, and took citalopram and went to counselling for about eighteen months. This past fall, I noticed the symptoms creeping back – I was irritable all the time, headaches, insomnia…sudden crying. Now I’m taking escitalopram.

It helps. Most days, I feel normal – for a given value of “normal”, being a playwright and so on. I’ve previously had acquaintances question whether I should be taking meds. Given the choice between wishing this, or endo, on my worst enemy, I’d choose neither.

I take the escitalopram once a day, and like most medication, the idea is to take it at the same time every day, so the body has a consistent supply. Shortly after I started this one, I set myself a reminder on my phone to take it after dinner – I was forgetting in the mornings, and would sometimes miss it in the evenings if I was going out. And on the odd bad day, if I missed taking it, I felt as rotten as when I wasn’t taking it at all.

This past Friday, our executive director of APN, Trevor, was in Edmonton. I got home from work, had a quick dinner, and went to the meet-up. We talked shop from 7 till 10. Before driving home, I checked my phone, and realized I had missed taking my meds. It was fairly late, I felt fine, so I figured this one day would be okay. I got home and went to bed.

Then yesterday, Saturday, I got up, and went straight to writing. I’ve had an idea for a screenplay (uh huh) percolating, and this year’s deadline for Praxis’ Screenwriting Lab is 30 June. I wrote 35 pages yesterday. I was so excited about what I’d written, I was buzzing. I went out to get a taco salad for dinner, and when I got in and looked at my clock…I was late in taking my meds again! Two days in a row wouldn’t be good, so I took it right then.

I have never missed taking my meds two days in a row. I was perplexed by that. And it still wasn’t until I’d had a mini-facial with my volcanic face-mud from Iceland, and falling asleep with my cat under my arm, that it dawned on me: I had forgotten about taking my meds because I didn’t just feel fine. I felt happy.

I don’t like having to remember what happy feels like.

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come say hi and have GELATO!

Okay, I’M having gelato. You can have whatever you want.

The intrepid executive director of Alberta Playwrights Network is going to be in Edmonton for Wordshed this weekend, and Friday night, June 20, a bunch of we playwrights are getting together at Block 1912 on Whyte Ave. I’ll be there, and if you’re cool, so will you.

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Photographic memory.

Two members of Walterdale Playhouse have done something mad and amazing.

Now online are the production photos from every show ever performed at Walterdale. Since 1958.

This includes the premiere of Crushed, in 1997.

Have a look!

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Go see Murderers Confess at Christmastime!

I’ve already tweeted this, but it’s very, very important you go see this show. Jason Chinn is one of my favourite playwrights – not just “local” or someone I know, but one of my favourite writers PERIOD. I’m gleeful when I hear he’s done something new and I can see it. This show has already been done in Toronto, and now it’s at Theatre Network here in Edmonton.

It’s important people see it – not just because it’s good – but it’s so utterly different, and brain-busting, from what anyone else here is doing. So if you genuinely love “envelope-pushing” theatre…and I can only assume if you’re reading this you do…see this show.

(The one thing I wish, WISH, I could do as well as Jason is titles. Murderers Confess at Christmastime?? And his last play was called Ladies Who Lynch. I need to hire him to give my plays titles that’ll make audiences do a double-take like his do.

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THE WHEATLEYS KNOW WHO I AM.

In the great sea of the internet, anyway.

This is what happened on Twitter today:

iPhone capture from Twitter.
iPhone capture from Twitter.

I have been waiting to see this film since last July. I tweeted this musing randomly (what else is Twitter but random musing?) on my lunch break from my day job. And get a reply from what I incredulously assumed was a spambot, or a fan who tweets under Mr Wheatley’s name. But on looking at the profile of @mr_wheatley (followed by Tom Hiddleston and Mark Gatiss, among others), and looking at the website…

It could be Ben Wheatley and Amy Jump’s staff, managing their blog, who look for any mention of their films. BUT WHO CARES?

So, yeah. Tonight, I have an APN phone meeting, and then I need to renew some artist memberships — because I’m a card-carrying artist. And then, instead of doing dishes OR watching A Field in England, I’m going to write. Because Mr and Mrs Wheatley told me to!

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“Only this, and nothing more.”

I saw Catalyst Theatre‘s show Nevermore last night. It was first created in 2008, and has been performed in Europe and at the 2010 Cultural Olympiad since then. This remount is, yes, the first time I’ve seen it. And I was still barely ready to.

I have been a fan of Edgar Allan Poe since I was 16. Emo, right? I first read The Raven in grade 11. I was in the advanced humanities courses at my high school; One of the pieces I annotated and analyzed was The Masque of the Red Death. I didn’t think much about this – he was a famous author, of course lots of people liked him, I thought. And then, once I learned more about his life, I realized I’d identified with him, just through his work.

My writing is not nearly as macabre as Poe’s. It has been noted though, that one of the characters dies in every one of my plays, usually in a…messy fashion. Those ideas come from somewhere.

The best way I have of explaining this is indirectly. A long time ago now, when Buffy the Vampire Slayer was still on, but had been for a while, a group of close friends kept telling me I would love the show and had to watch it. One day, I was at one couple’s house and everyone decided today was the day: they popped in a recorded episode of Buffy, and we all sat down to watch. Unfortunately, the episode my close friends had chosen was the one where Buffy’s mother died. I bolted from the room and locked myself in the bathroom, willing myself not to throw up. A few minutes later, there was a knock on the door, and when I got it open, my one friend shamefacedly said we could watch something else. Joss Whedon, that mad genius, got it right. TOO right.

If you’re a fan of Poe, you’ll know his life was one tragedy after another. One would wonder how he remained functional, and the answer would be he didn’t – that’s why he was alcoholic. He was a gifted writer with a huge imagination, and like all children, he imagined monstrous things. But he witnessed his mother die when he was 8…the first he’d see of many. His monsters were real. Nevermore so perfectly made Edgar’s thoughts visual, right in front of me, that when I wasn’t gasping I was crying.

It’s not always a good idea to entangle an author’s life with what they write, but Poe’s work is fascinating, and his own story too clearly shows where that work came from. Some people are so strong that they can genuinely take anything and remain standing. Poe wasn’t one of those. And that makes this writer feel relieved on those days I can’t stand up.