"If I’m a grilled cheese sandwich, she’s duck confit"

At the end of 2013, in an epic meeting over sangria at the marvelous Cafe Flore, we Theater Pub bloggers stopped feeling like individual wordsmiths rushing to meet column deadlines, and started to feel like we were a Thing. A tribe. A collective. To cement our newfound camaraderie and celebrate a very successful year for the blog, we agreed that our last post of the year should highlight the best writing of 2013, both on our blog and on the Internet at large.

I had the honor of writing in praise of Will Leschber, one of the newer Theater Pub bloggers, who writes about the connections between theater and cinema. I also singled out a Howlround piece by local theater critic Lily "Lightning Rod" Janiak as my other must-read piece of theater-related writing from 2013.

And I received this lovely write-up about my own work from Allison Page. Each time I read it, I still glow a little inside and then vow to try to live up to this praise:

Marissa Skudlarek and I communicate differently, but we think about a lot of the same things. If I’m a grilled cheese sandwich, she’s duck confit. She has the ability to say things that I know I’m also feeling, but haven’t brought myself to express properly without the use of a lot of F-bombs and references to Murder, She Wrote. Generally speaking, I like to accentuate the positive rather than wallow in a pool of the negative, so when her article “You’re Doing It Wrong, You’re Doing It Wrong” (technically the second half of a two-part article. The first one is also worth reading, but the second really drove it home for me). The internet, and the world, can be a dark and dismal place. Some days it feels like there’s nothing to be happy about; nothing that’s going right. In a world that seeks to find the worst in everything, Marissa seeks out the subtle nuances of her theatrical experiences, and of the world around her. It’s refreshing and thoughtful, and a big reason I love reading her posts. Not everyone is doing it right wrong. I like to think Marissa is striving to do it right; for women in general and for herself.

Go to the Theater Pub blog to read the whole piece, including my paragraphs in praise of Will and Lily, and many other encomia. There is also a pretty great photo of me sitting on a dinosaur while wearing a '60s sheath dress and holding a parasol.

And if I may say so, the Theater Pub blog has been seriously killing it in the New Year, so if you have any interest in independent theater (whether you live in the Bay Area or not), you should bookmark it and visit it regularly. I am honored to be part of this collective of smart, thoughtful, honest, curious, and yes, positive writers.

And P.S. I think a grilled cheese sandwich with duck confit sounds like the best thing ever.

A Development Hell Of Our Own Making @ SF Theater Pub Blog

My Theater Pub column this week is my longest column yet! Even better, it's also one of my most widely-read and -discussed columns, too, after @2amt (2 AM Theatre) tweeted a link to it. I am really proud to have written something that started some conversations. I am also really proud of the fact that, according to Google, I am the only person who has ever used the phrase "a development hell of our own making."

And that's the theme of the piece, basically: we are told not to self-produce our plays until they are "ready," and that we should put them through multiple drafts, readings, and workshops before production. But is it possible to take that too far? There seems to be a trend of telling writers that they must develop a play for years before it can be considered stageworthy—and that has dangerous implications for the theater.

The column also contains this theory/metaphor/analogy that I am really proud of, because
it's offbeat and slightly offensive and as close as I'll ever come to making a dead-baby joke in a serious essay:

You’ve probably heard people compare writing a play to having or raising a child. And, in the olden days of high infant mortality, parents would have lots of children and then try not to get too attached to them, for fear that the child would die. Discipline was severe, and parents expected their kids to grow up fast. Nowadays, people plan for their children carefully, have just one or two kids, lavish them with attention, and overthink every aspect of parenting. Likewise, in the olden days, playwrights expected to write plays at a steady pace, have them produced regularly, and then move on to their next play. But, nowadays, we are encouraged to write fewer plays, and become “helicopter parents” to the plays we have written.

The column, by the way, is titled "I Don't Want to Wait," and now most of you probably have that '90s Paula Cole song stuck in your head and scenes of Dawson's Creek flashing before your eyes (YOU'RE WELCOME). But it's also pretty close to the title of a song by my friend Robin Yukiko – "Don't Wanna Wait" is from her new album, and the video just came out:



My boyfriend appears briefly in the video as a stern, disapproving librarian... very out of character for him, I must say. (Well, the bookishness and the good dress sense is not out of character, but the stony-faced attitude is!)

New Links and Mentions for the New Year

Out with the old, in with the new! A fine motto, but I still have a lot of end-of-2013 business to catch up on. (In general, I want to be better about blogging relevant links, rather than just posting them on Twitter or Facebook, since a blog is a less ephemeral, more easily searchable medium... Ten years ago, who ever thought there'd come a day when blogs would seem like islands of permanence and stability in a sea of online ephemera?)

Anyway, here are a few links to some recent posts from friends and acquaintances in the San Francisco theater community that I wanted to preserve:

• At the end of his massive end-of-2013 post, my friend Charles Lewis III published his list of favorite quotes of the year – I'm proud to say that I'm the only person who had two of her quotes make Charles' list!
• For the Theater Pub blog, Charles also wrote up a piece about the Pub's spinoff endeavor "Saturday Write Fever," a celebration of writing, acting, and randomly sparked creativity. I get a brief name-check in this article.
• After the 19 ATLAS participants completed Theater Bay Area's series of professional-development workshops for playwrights, Ignacio Zulueta interviewed me and several other participants about our experience. His article is now up on the TBA site.
• Again from the Theater Pub blog: Allison Page writes up a great piece encouraging playwrights to "produce it yo own self." I swear, it's like she's reading my mind (or maybe it's just that she and I had a conversation about this very issue in December). It's also worth reading the Storify of HowlRound's recent Twitter conversation on self-producing, if Allison's piece has inspired you to try it out.

How to Be a Minor Jane Austen Heroine

"All were contented to pass quietly and carefully down the steep flight, excepting Louisa; she must be jumped down them by Captain Wentworth. In all their walks, he had had to jump her from the stiles; the sensation was delightful to her. The hardness of the pavement for her feet, made him less willing upon the present occasion; he did it, however. She was safely down, and instantly, to show her enjoyment, ran up the steps to be jumped down again. He advised her against it, thought the jar too great; but no, he reasoned and talked in vain, she smiled and said, "I am determined I will": he put out his hands; she was too precipitate by half a second, she fell on the pavement on the Lower Cobb."

—Jane Austen, Persuasion, ch. 12

This is by way of saying that yesterday, as I was jumping around on a concrete barrier at the beach at Pacifica, I slipped and fell and banged up my leg pretty bad. As I lay on the sofa with an ice pack on my swelling leg, I tried to make the best of it by thinking of myself as a 21st-century Austen character — because it was all very much like the scene where Louisa Musgrove slips and falls while jumping around on the seawall at Lyme Regis.

If only I'd had some Jane Austen bandages at my disposal, huh? (I saw these in a gift shop when I was in Oregon over Christmas.)

So, this clearly shows that I'm someone who thinks too much about literary heroines and how I may or may not resemble them. That's why I'm eager to read the new book by my friend Samantha Ellis, How to Be a Heroine, which was published in the U.K. today! (Will it find a U.S. publisher or should I just order it from Amazon.uk, I wonder?) It's billed as "a funny, touching, inspiring exploration of the role of heroines, and our favourite books, in all our lives – and how they change over time, for better or worse, just as we do." In other words, it sounds like the kind of friendly, feminist, literary-nerd book that I've always wanted to read. Congratulations, Sam!

Sam's publisher has also put out a "which literary heroine are you?" quiz to promote the book; according to it, I'm Anne of Green Gables.

Bonus link to one of my blog posts from 2007: Am I a Jane Austen Heroine? 

"Blackbird Fly" Music Video Shoot: Mad Tea Parties and Three-Piece Suits

Last November, I got an urgent email from my friend Meg O'Connor. She was producing a music video for a local singer-songwriter, and one of the actors had just dropped out. Would I be interested in waking up early on Saturday, going out to Thornton Beach, and spending the day as an extra in a "mad tea party" scene? I seemed like the kind of person who'd be up for that sort of thing — not to mention the kind of person who could put together an appropriate "mad tea party" costume on short notice.

I was intrigued by Meg's offer and, as it turned out, I had recently dressed up as a suffragette for Halloween, so I had just bought a long Victorian-ish skirt that would work well as the basis for my costume. Meg and her boyfriend picked me up at 7:30 AM on Saturday and I spent a sunny, windy day at the beach, chatting with my fellow extras, pretending to drink tea and eat treats, and trying not to freeze to death.

Despite the cold, the shoot was a lot of fun. So, a month later, when Meg put out a call for dozens more extras for a nightclub scene, I decided to go to that shoot, too. It was a work night; the Olympians Festival was in full swing; I was very busy, and very tired... but something compelled me to participate anyway. "Maybe you'll meet somebody interesting," I told myself. "The reason you live in San Francisco is to take advantage of weird-but-cool opportunities like this."

And as I stood around in the nightclub waiting for filming to begin, I caught sight of one of my fellow extras, a man in a gray three-piece suit and a fedora. And he caught sight of me. I contrived some kind of excuse to chat with him, and soon the conversation was flowing naturally. I learned that he was a high school teacher and a former Classics major — he thought it was so unbelievably awesome that I was involved in a Greek-mythology theater festival. Throughout the night, we continued talking, and discovered more and more points of similarity and connection (we're both from Portland; we went to rival high schools!). Film sets are actually great places for getting to know people — you have a lot of time to stand around and chat with the other extras.
We exchanged numbers and had our first date later that week, seeing Meg O'Connor's Olympians Festival play. Long story short, we continued to see each other throughout the winter, and as of the vernal equinox, we officially became boyfriend and girlfriend.

Needless to say, we are both so glad that we chose to go to the film shoot on that December night, and we love that there's videographic documentation of the night we met! After several months of post-production, the video has finally been completed and released to the Internet. Here it is:

Volary - Blackbird Fly [Official Music Video] from Independent Art Film Productions on Vimeo.

There are several shots of me in the tea party scene (from about 2:00 to 2:40), including a nice close-up. In the scenes at the club, my boyfriend and I can be seen briefly at 1:29 and 3:22, with a slightly longer shot from 3:26 to 3:28 (we're behind the singer, standing against the brick wall).

Here's a behind-the-scenes photo of us on that night (flanked by other friends/extras) if you need a better idea of who to look out for.

My boyfriend and I are well aware that this is one of the most ridiculous "meet cute" stories ever. At the same time, we like to think it's a good story. And it proves the old truism that the best way to meet people is to keep busy and force yourself to do interesting, unusual things.

And maybe the following isn't a truism, but it should be: sometimes, after years of having a love life that is either bad or boring, a man in a three-piece suit will come along, and you'll be smart enough to take notice, and he'll turn out to be a better fit for you than you ever thought possible.

I'm a lucky girl.

Bon Anniversaire, Cody Rishell

Today's post is dedicated to my friend Cody Rishell, because it's his birthday and because I haven't properly thanked him, on this blog, for all of the ways his art and his friendship have enhanced my life over the past three years.

The first real memory I have of Cody is working the Olympians Festival audition sign-in table with him in 2010. He was talking a mile a minute about The House of Mirth (he had just watched the heartbreaking Gillian Anderson film version) and "California Gurls" (the song had just been released and Cody already had it stuck in his head). Not many people can talk with equal authority and enthusiasm about Edith Wharton novels and Katy Perry songs -- so Cody immediately piqued my interest as someone I'd like to know better.

Since then, we have bonded over our mutual love for Alphonse Mucha, La Traviata, The Great Gatsby, indie theater, and much more. Last year, I served as copy-editor and Cody did the layout for the Bay One-Acts play anthology -- we had a ridiculously quick turn-around time to put the book together (one week) but we ended up having a surprising amount of fun doing it. When I discovered that I could use Google Docs to compile a list of typos as I found them, and Cody could see the list update automatically as I typed, he wrote that his "head was exploding with unicorn glitter sex." Yes, it is that much fun to work on copy-editing a book with Cody.

Cody coordinates all of the art for the Olympians Festival each year, meaning that he recruited the artists who did the beautiful posters for my plays Pleiades (Emily C. Martin) and Aphrodite (Kelly Lawrence).

This year, Cody did black-and-white portraits of me, Stuart Bousel, and Meg O'Connor to serve as the promo artwork for our "Behind the Curtain" mini-festival at the end of March. I love the portrait he did of me (based on my headshot photo), especially the eyebrows!

"I was trying to channel '1960s French secret agent go-go car racer girl,'" said Cody when I complimented him on the way he drew my eyebrows.

Because Cody says fabulous things like that. And then the only thing I could do in response was send him this YouTube video of Anna Karina singing "Roller Girl." (I cannot find a version of this online that I can embed in my blog. But click the link, it's worth it.)

Cody also had an art show last year called "Everyone Worth Knowing is a Mythological Creature in Disguise," which is a pretty great philosophy, n'est-ce pas?

I particularly like his drawings of the sexy minotaur girl who goes around carrying a parasol, which she wields like a weapon in defense of the less fortunate.

Cody also does all of the artwork for San Francisco Theater Pub, and I have to confess that one of the most exciting things about producing a show at Theater Pub was the prospect of seeing what Cody would draw for the program. His illustration for Orphée this month was even better than I could've hoped: it was double-sided, with Orphée on one side of the paper and Eurydice on the other. So if you hold it up to the light, the image of Eurydice shines through the paper like a ghost. I can't find a picture of this online (and that wouldn't be the right format for it, anyway) but trust me, it was amazing.

So happy birthday, Cody, you mythological creature in disguise, and thank you for all of your beautiful artwork. Here's to many more years and much more beauty.

Sketchy Shakespeare

A college friend of mine recently started a blog called Shakesketch -- whimsical illustrations inspired by Shakespeare quotes.

I suggested "Egypt, thou knew’st too well / My heart was to thy rudder tied by the strings / And thou shouldst tow me after" from Antony and Cleopatra, with this as the result:



Go over to Shakesketch to check out the other illustrations and send your own favorite Shakespeare quote to the artist!

It really is a great daily reminder of the richness of Shakespeare's language and metaphors.

Quick Hits: My Awesome Friends

Some quick mid-February links that I cannot wait to share with you:

• My awesome friend Claire Rice is writing a new play titled English for Beginners and posting it all on her blog. It's been featured on Arena Stage's New Plays Blog and has a significant portion of the San Francisco theater community buzzing. Particularly because English for Beginners is an ensemble comedy-drama about 13 playwrights on a writing retreat in the Marin Headlands. (When Claire told me about this project, my first question was "OK, just how much of a roman à clef is this going to be?") I get super excited whenever I learn that Claire has posted a new scene and I am never disappointed. Of course, part of my enjoyment derives from trying to identify the real-life models for Claire's characters -- if you want an example of that, read the most recent scene (an interlude in which all 13 characters talk about their routines for writing) and then read this blog post of mine from last spring. But I think that any theater person, even if they don't live in the Bay Area, will recognize and identify the characters and situations of English for Beginners. Can't wait for the next installment.

• My equally awesome friend Megan Cohen has just started a blog that's going really big, really fast. She has three posts so far, Tim Bauer (whose own blog has recently undergone a redesign) has linked to all of them, and her latest post just got highlighted by Lifehacker! Megan's friends are fond of saying things like "I wish I could shrink Megan down and put her in my pocket and keep her around all the time to say witty and offbeat and wonderful things."  And now that she has a blog -- it's like you can do just that!

• Ulterior motive in including some quotes about Helen of Troy in my last blog post: San Francisco Theater Pub's February show will be a staged reading of Euripedes' romantic drama Helen. Appropriately enough, it's taking place on Valentine's Day. In the meantime, Stuart Bousel, the hardest-working man in show business, did an erudite series of posts about the myth of Helen for the San Francisco Theater Pub blog, as well as an interview with Kirsten Broadbear, who will play this iconic character. Scheduling conflicts prevented me from acting in the show as originally planned, but I'll be at Theater Pub tomorrow anyway, wrapped in a bedsheet and taking your money. (I'll be handling the box office and wearing a toga.) Happy Valentine's Day!

One-Minute Plays for the Holidays

Can you believe it's December already?  Three weeks to Christmas... and two weeks to the San Francisco One-Minute Plays Festival!

I will have two plays in the festival (to be directed by Evren Odcikin and Christine Young), and several of my playwright friends are also participating, including Tim Bauer, Megan Cohen, Bennett Fisher, Marisela Treviño Orta and Ignacio Zulueta.

I love the mix of writers that are involved this year and it is an honor to be in the same festival as some much better-known Bay Area playwrights like Eugenie Chan and Philip Kan Gotanda.

Saturday December 17 at 8 PM and Sunday December 18 at 2 PM and 7 PM, at the Thick House on Potrero Hill.  Tickets here. As Ignacio pointed out, it's a 99-seat house and only 3 performances, so get your tickets now!

That's really all the information you need -- I can't tell you what my plays are about, because it's really easy to spoil a one-minute play!

Also check out the One-Minute Play Blog.

"Hermes," an Olympians Festival Success Story

It's been eight months since I devoted my weekends to working the box office at the San Francisco Olympians Festival -- and it's seven months until Olympians Festival II: Heavenly Bodies, for which I am a writer and associate producer. Don't mistake this for a lull or a fallow period, though! I'm hard at work on my play -- and feeling inspired by seeing Bennett Fisher's Hermes, a script from last summer's Olympians Festival, in a full production this month.

Hermes was one of my favorite plays last summer, and I'm happy that so many more people now have the chance to see it. It's a fast-moving drama about four American derivatives traders devising shady ways to profit from the Greek financial crisis. When they cross one ethical line too many, they attract the attention of Hermes -- god of business, money, liars and thieves. While Hermes is a very angry play, enraged at the manipulation of the financial markets by amoral and rapacious actors, it is also very funny. Hermes comes back to earth in the form of a fratty bro who enjoys giving people stupid nicknames and punching them in the balls.

Stuart Bousel, founder and producer of No Nude Men and the Olympians Festival, says Hermes merits a full production because it embodies the original goal of the festival: to prove the continuing relevance and power of Greek mythology. Ben Fisher doesn't just retell a myth about Hermes, he invents a new one, and explores an aspect of Hermes' personality that often goes unremarked upon. (We tend to think of Hermes as a cheerful trickster, not an amoral bully.) The Greek gods were very human gods, each representing a different aspect of human nature or human life. Because the themes that they embodied are still with us today, so, too, are the gods themselves.

Not only is Hermes a great example of the relevance of Greek mythology, but it is also a great example of the relevance and power of theater itself. As I said, this play centers on the Greek financial crisis -- a real event that happened just one year ago. This kind of rapid response to world events is something that theater (especially small, non-commercial theater) can do but other narrative art forms, such as fiction and film, have more trouble achieving. In Act II of Hermes, the god causes the Icelandic volcano, Eyjafjallajökull, to erupt, stranding the human characters in Europe. When I saw this scene in the July reading of Hermes -- just three months after the volcano had erupted in real life -- I was amazed at the audacity and cleverness of it. When was the last time you saw a play that even referenced an event that happened so recently? And Ben does more than reference the event -- he works it into the plot and mythological framework of the play.

The craftsmanship of Hermes therefore fascinates me: it was written almost in real time, reacting to events in the outside world. When you've got a commission to write a play about Hermes, and various factors conspire to cause a debt crisis in Greece -- Greece, of all places! -- you'd damn well better take advantage of that. And yet, despite the immediacy of the piece, it also has a reflective side, finding interesting things to say about greed, power, and the similarity between gods and debt: "both are substitutes for more tangible assets."

Helping to make the intangible words on a page into a tangible full production are director Tore Ingersoll-Thorpe and six talented actors, all of whom are skilled at delivering the tangy dialogue. Juliana Egley, Geoffrey Nolan, Carl Lucania and Brian Markley play the derivatives traders, Lauren Spencer plays the goddess Hestia (a bartender and waitress), and Brian Trybom plays Hermes. You'll never look at this god the same way again -- and that's the point of the Olympians Festival, isn't it?

Hermes plays at the Exit Stage Left through March 26 -- details and tickets here.

Photo by Claire Ann Rice. Brian Trybom as Hermes, Geoffrey Nolan as Jack.

July is Olympians Month!

Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays for the rest of July, the gods will come to life in San Francisco! The San Francisco Olympians Festival, featuring staged readings of 12 new original plays that each focus on one of the major gods of the Greek pantheon, is going on all month at the Exit Stage Left (156 Eddy Street).

A little more about the plays, authors, and schedule (copied from the Facebook event page):

DIONYSUS by Nathan Tucker, July 8
An esoteric mystery cult in San Francisco invokes the godhead of an ancient deity, manifesting his presence and unleashing the Wrath of Dionysus.

APOLLO by Garret Groenveld, July 9
Apollo's Gift - that of foresight - was given to Cassandra out of love and proves the undoing of their chances.

POSEIDON by Bryce Allemann, Dana Constance and Kathy Hicks, July 10
Fish speak because they have something to say; Gods because they have to say something.

HERMES by Bennett Fisher, July 15
Four derivative traders seeking to benefit from the Greek financial meltdown create a fraudulent company to mask the debt as an asset. This act of deceit brings unforeseeable consequences and an unexpected visitor.

ARTEMIS by M.R. Fall, July 16
By escaping to the beach, Artemis thought she would outrun the clouds of dread building inside her; little did she know a storm was waiting for her along the shore…

ZEUS by Helen Noakes, July 17
If Zeus is your daddy does it make you a delightful delusional, a delicious demigod, or just plain fabulous? Zeus Story tells all!

DEMETER by Claire Ann Rice, July 22
Anyone who knew the rituals have paid the ferryman for passage elsewhere and all that is left are Goddesses without believers, prayers without answers, and mothers without children.

APHRODITE by Nirmala Nataraj, July 23
In this dark comedy about the lengths women will go to for love and acceptance, a washed-out infomercial star confronts her demons through dating mishaps, plastic surgery, and mysterious visitations from the paragon of feminine allure—Aphrodite herself.

ARES by Sean Kelly, July 24
Bill is due to ship out on a Third-World peace-keeping mission when he accidentally makes a sacrifice to Ares, God of Bloodlust. Together they turn a basic military action into a violent quest for revenge.

ATHENA by Ashley Cowan, July 29
While trying to balance her rational intelligence and notions of romance, Athena finds herself in a personal exploration fueled by the timeless question: can only fools fall in love or can it also exist among reason and logic?

HERA by Stuart Bousel, July 30
A Victorian-Era parlor drama about the perfect wife and mother, and the secrets which threaten to destroy her extensively engineered domestic bliss.

HEPHAESTUS by Evelyn Jean Pine, July 31
The world of Hephaestus, god of fire and volcanoes, erupts when his creations -- three gorgeous, golden robots -- revolt.

12 different gods. 12 different aspects of what it means to be human. I'll be working the box office for the festival every night... so stop by, say hello, buy a ticket ($10), and see some great new plays. Go to 4 readings, and get the 5th free!

All readings begin at 8 PM; box office opens around 7:30 (we do not take reservations). Before the show, you can check out our lobby exhibition of original artwork inspired by the 12 Olympians... and after the show, hang out with the writers and actors at a local bar!

Lots more information available at sfolympians.com.

C'était chez moi

As I predicted, tonight's episode of the French cooking show was filmed in Thierry's apartment, where I lived when studying in France 3 years ago! In it, a young woman named Nadia shows my host father Thierry how to make spaghetti with olive oil, garlic and chilis.



That's the apartment, the blue door, the tiny but cheerful kitchen, the bowls and colanders, that I remember! I have to say, it's a bit surreal to see all of that on TV (or on web video, whatever).

See My French Host Father Make Ginger Chicken!

This is amazing! My French host father Thierry was featured on a TV show called La prochaine fois c'est chez moi (meaning "Next time, it's at my house") cooking one of his many fantastic recipes--a dish that I remember him making when I lived with him and his wife Catherine three years ago!

The premise of the show is that an amateur chef goes to somebody else's house and cooks a dish for them; then in the next episode, the person who was the chef is now the host, and somebody new comes to their house and prepares a meal. Each recipe also gets posted on the show's website.

Here, Thierry cooks ginger-soy chicken for a woman named Carine. I assume the next show will feature a guest cooking something for Thierry in the apartment that I know so well--I'll link to that video if it's online tomorrow!

Of course the video is only in French, but you get to see Thierry put on his favorite apron and demonstrate his techniques for chopping onions and crushing ginger!



Thierry loves to travel and, while he excels at French dishes like raclette and blanquette de veau, he's accumulated recipes from all over the world. This one comes from a Chinese friend. As he explains in the video: "I had a doctor, an acupuncturist, who loved food, and he told me about this recipe of chicken with ginger sauce, so now I call it Doctor Wang's Chicken."

And if you want to make it for yourself, I've translated the recipe:

Doctor Wang's Chicken
from the kitchen of Thierry C.

• 4 chicken legs (or 4 thighs and 4 drumsticks)
• 2 Tbsp olive oil
  
• 1 large onion, finely chopped
• 1 fresh ginger root, peeled and crushed
• 4 cloves garlic, crushed
• 1 cup dry white wine or lemon juice
• 1/2 cup black soy sauce
• Salt & pepper to taste

Remove skin from chicken and discard. Cut each leg into two pieces, if the thighs and drumsticks are not already separated.

Heat 1 Tbsp olive oil in a skillet over medium-high heat, then sauté the chicken until it is browned on all sides. Set the meat aside.

Turn down the heat to low and add the rest of the oil, the chopped onion, the garlic and the ginger. Cook until the onions are very soft and everything melts together.

Use the white wine (or the lemon juice, if you prefer) to deglaze the pan, then add the soy sauce and the chicken. If using lemon juice, also add 1 cup water. Season with pepper to taste.

Let the chicken stew over low heat for 35 minutes. Taste and adjust seasonings accordingly.

Serve with Thai or Basmati rice.

Theatre Links, November 24

• Sarah Ruhl's In the Next Room, or the Vibrator Play--which I saw at its first preview at Berkeley Rep--has now opened on Broadway. Here is a round-up of the critics' opinions. Going by this scale, I think my personal grade would be in the B or B-minus range... generally enjoying the play while also thinking that it tries to stir a few too many themes together and doesn't quite gel. Then too, I tend to be indulgent of such faults (over-ambitiousness, over-cleverness) since they are the faults that I am prone to myself.

• Boston Globe theater critic embarrasses himself by a. writing a review that is a gushy mash note to one actress in a large and complex production and b. getting the actress's name wrong. Linking to this because the actress in question is someone that I went to college with! (She played the leading role in the first staged reading of my first play.) Good for her... I guess?

• The play that my college friend is acting in is called Sleep No More, and actually sounds really intriguing--an immersive mash-up of Macbeth and Hitchcock. Here's a Boston Globe preview article, a better review, and a blogger who also mentions my friend's scene. When Isaac of Parabasis recently asked "What plays do you refuse to see again?" I nominated Macbeth, because I don't consider it one of Shakespeare's best plays and I am really sick of it (within a 6-year span, I saw 3 productions and acted in 1). But if I were on the East Coast I would SO try to see Sleep No More, even though it's a Macbeth adaptation--and even if I didn't know any of the cast members!
  

On Trying to Do Too Much

If you know me in person, you're probably aware that I am a perfectionist--and even if we've never met, you might get that impression of me just from reading this blog. Lately I've been contemplating my perfectionistic tendencies--my habit of trying to do too much, of thinking that everything I create needs to be stunningly original and word-perfect and complex and insightful. And I'm realizing just how detrimental that is. My perfectionism, that is, my fear, is slowing me down.

These reflections were prompted by going to see a new play called Zombie Town, by my blogfriend Tim Bauer. Zombie Town has a fun structural conceit: it asks us to believe that about a year ago, a zombie uprising actually took place in a small town in Texas, and that afterwards, a troupe of actors from San Francisco traveled to the town, interviewed the survivors, and made a documentary theater piece. And that is ostensibly the play that we are seeing performed. This amusing idea allows Tim to make fun of both the small-town Texans and the pretentious San Franciscans, and also offers a way around the difficulty of showing a zombie apocalypse onstage. It's The Laramie Project, but with zombies! Take a hook like that, develop it well, and you've got a good play on your hands.

But, I realized, the thing is that if I had come up with this idea, I wouldn't have developed it well. I'd have tried to do too much. At first, I would've dismissed out of hand the idea of writing a zombie play: "You're the wrong person to write it, Marissa," I'd tell myself. "You're not a horror fan and your audience is sure to have seen way more zombie movies than you have!" But then, if the idea kept niggling at my mind, insisting that I had to write this play, I would go too far in the opposite direction. I'd convince myself that I couldn't write it until I had learned everything there was to know about the history of zombies in popular culture--watching the most notable zombie films so that I could then either pay homage to them, or avoid plagiarizing them. I would get so enthralled with the metatheatrical conceit that I would give all of the characters an elaborate backstory that slowly got revealed over the course of the evening. I would probably burden the play with some kind of overarching metaphorical structure about the Significance and Meaning of Zombies in the 21st Century.

In short, I would be a Pretentious San Francisco Playwright.

But Tim is not pretentious, which allows him to skewer his characters' pretensions all the more effectively, and to write a fast-moving, entertaining zombie comedy without looking over his shoulder the whole time and wondering if he's doing it right. His play gave us what we wanted and was never lumbering or ponderous; but I have this feeling that if I had started with the same conceit, I would have overworked it and come up with a play that was much baggier and more complex, less sheerly fun. And the writing process would have been agony the whole way through.

Similar thoughts occurred to me after reading the short story in last week's New Yorker, called "While the Women are Sleeping," by Javier Marías. Have you read it? Es bueno. In it, a first-person narrator describes meeting some strange people while on vacation with his wife. And I really enjoyed the story while I was reading it, but then I started to second-guess myself. "We don't learn anything about what kind of a person the narrator is," I thought. "He's obviously meant to be normal, an Everyman, a stand-in for the reader, in contrast to the weird guy he meets at the beach--but isn't it lazy, to write a narrator who has no personality?" But then I realized, maybe I wouldn't want to read a whole novel narrated by this guy, but it's just fine for a short story. I didn't notice the narrator's lack of personality when I was reading and liking the story--only afterward, when I started to nitpick it to death. (And upon further reflection--the narrator's passivity might make the end of the story more effective.) And so, again: if I had written this short story, I'd have expended way too much effort in trying to give the narrator a unique personality, and the result would be overdetermined.

So yeah, in my writing, I have a bad habit of wanting to do too much. Which means it's ironic, isn't it, that I've set myself the task of writing a blog post every day this month--isn't that a symptom of doing too much? Well, no, actually. Instead, I'm hoping that NaBloPoMo will have the opposite effect on me. If I write only a few blog posts a week, I can convince myself that everything I post has to be lengthy, brilliant, word-perfect, etc. But if I blog every day, I will have no choice but to post some things that aren't perfect. To post a video with limited commentary as opposed to a beautifully argued essay that over-explains everything. To write shorter posts or more humorous ones. Or, if I write a longer post, to have it ramble and be self-critical and perhaps "not of general interest." Like the post you have just read.

"The Letter": notes on an opera's world premiere

Exactly three weeks ago, I was at the world premiere of the opera The Letter, in Santa Fe. As I mentioned before, the main reason I was excited to see this is because I'm friends with Terry Teachout, the librettist. Because of this personal connection, and also because so much time has elapsed, I'm not "reviewing" it in my usual fashion. Instead, here are some notes, impressions, things that stuck with me...

• The morning of the day the opera premiered, I attended a symposium hosted by Terry and Paul Moravec, the composer. Their collaborative process is really inspirational for anyone who hopes to work in the arts. Following Sondheim's dictum "before you start to write a show, make sure you're all writing the same show!" they spent a long time just figuring out what kind of opera they wanted to write, what its antecedents and stylistic hallmarks would be. And thus, during the writing process, they never had a single fight! They sum up The Letter with the phrase "opera noir": it is based on Somerset Maugham's tale of adultery and murder in entre-les-guerres Malaysia, and the goal was to make it as emotional as an opera and as swift and deadly as a film noir. "This is not an egghead opera!" Terry said repeatedly.
  


• Even so, I know I'm not really qualified to discuss Paul's music because of my lack of experience with modern opera and modern classical music in general. (But yes, I am qualified to call Paul by his first name, since Terry introduced us after the symposium.) I would say that it's the kind of music where you can remember the general contours of the vocal lines, but not any distinct melodies. For instance, I remember that Leslie's first aria ends with her shrieking the word "Blood!" on a very high note, and the Chinese Woman's aria ends on low mezzo notes, rueful and meditative. The text-setting was generally intutitive; it wasn't hard to make out the words. At the symposium, Paul said that he used a twelve-tone scale for Leslie, the liar and murderess (thus making her a "serial killer," ha-ha) and a diatonic scale for Robert, her cuckolded husband. And it's true that when Robert began his first extended passage of music (singing to Leslie to comfort her after the murder), you could feel everyone sort of relax into it, because it was the first diatonic section of the opera. The twelve-tone or chromatic music puts you more on edge, but why shouldn't it? Murky music for an opera about murky people.


• A vicarious thrill: I am 99% sure that Peter Gelb, General Manager of the Metropolitan Opera, walked past me twice as I stood outside the opera house, waiting to take my seat! I recognized him from photographs--in a dark suit, bald, with glasses, he looked rather like an "egghead" himself! I wondered, too, if he carried an invisible aura of celebrity and power about him--something that caused me to notice him in the crowd in the first place, even though he is not a very distinctive-looking man. He ought to have that aura--he's probably the most important man in American opera!

• My mom and I also got a vicarious thrill from seeing Tom Ford, the opera's costume designer, take his bow wearing one of his natty suits with an open-necked shirt. His work on the opera was very stylish--requiring lots of tailored white linen or tropical-weight wool suits for all of the male characters. There are only two females in the opera, but I loved the frilly pink net pegnoir that Leslie wore at the start of the opera, as well as the Chinese Woman's platform shoes and extra-long fingernails!


• The sets and lighting also looked great--and worked in conjunction because of the ceiling fans that rotated and cast noirish shadows across the stage. Stories about despicable people are always better when they're placed in an attractive setting--I guess because we get seduced by the setting for a while, only to get a jolt when we realize the true awfulness that lies below the stylish surface...


• In The Letter, this awfulness isn't just Leslie's adultery, lies, and murder; it's the white characters' casual and unthinking racism toward Asians. This is brought to the fore in a scene that takes place in a men's club, where the men sing a jaunty ditty saluting Leslie and insulting Geoff, who had taken an Asian mistress--"It was a daaamn good thing she shot him!" I believe this is the only section of the opera that uses rhyme and a conventional foursquare meter, so again, it lulls you into laughing and tapping your foot, until you realize what you're laughing at...
  


• Yet at the same time, the opera is not about "the evils of racism" or anything like that. That would make it an intellectualized, moralizing, "egghead opera"--just what Terry and Paul didn't want to write. The Colonial Malaysia setting lends the opera a stylish atmosphere and helps provide motivations for some of the characters--for instance, they're poisoned by racism, or they're frustrated to be so far from England. But deep down, the story is a very basic one--change a few details and you could easily transfer it to a different place and time. This seems to me to be a feature of many of the most enduring operas--e.g. we don't go to see Tosca because of all that Napoleonic-era political stuff, but because of the human interactions between Tosca, Scarpia and Cavaradossi.


• One of my favorite bits of characterization came in the last scene of the opera. Throughout the other scenes, Robert has been an endlessly trusting and supportive husband, with his emotions under control. But at the end, he starts to get suspicious of Leslie (even though she's been acquitted), and his personality changes: he becomes kind of dangerously cheerful, angry, possibly drunk. In other words, you've gotten to know Robert well enough over the course of the opera (through both the music and the acting) that you immediately recognize this shift in his personality--and this leads to a sense of foreboding. Sure enough, something really bad happens to finish out the opera...


• As for the singers, Patricia Racette did a great job with Leslie's challenging music, as well as showing the different sides of her character: someone who knows how to behave like a poised, stiff-upper-lip planter's wife, but is actually sexually frustrated, passionate, and very self-centered. Anthony Michaels-Moore played Robert and, as I said in my paragraph above, his acting contributed a great deal to the success of the final scene. Also there was good support from James Maddalena, as Leslie's lawyer, and Roger Honeywell, as Leslie's deceased lover, a haunting voice calling from offstage in several of the scenes.
  

Terry and Paul have certainly succeeded in creating the exact opera that they wanted to create, and in knowing how to accurately describe what they have made--all of which is harder than it looks! And after reading so much about it on Terry's blog (see all his posts here) it was wonderful to see the artistic fulfillment of it. Bravo, gentlemen!

P.S. I don't feel like taking the time to add multiple images to this post, but if you want to see the costumes and sets, go here; and here for video excerpts of the opera. The photo at the top is of Patricia Racette.

merry merry happy happy

I know Christmas is almost over, but I can't go to bed without posting this video of "Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas," as sung by Theo, a friend of mine from high school.

The mood of the video sort of captures how my Christmas turned out. Relaxed. Lo-fi. Not a lot of crowds and excitement and forced holiday cheer. But warm and heartfelt.

I hope yours was the same.