MONDAY NEWS!

The talented and charismatic Michael Garces will be awarded the Princess Grace Statue this year. I am so impressed and amazed by this man. We've known Michael since we were wee apprentices at Actors Theatre of Louisville and he was in town for Humana directing When the Sea Drowns in Sand (renamed Havana is Waiting for its run at The Cherry Lane) by Eduardo Machado, whose thoughts about grad school I've been rereading lately (please draw your attention to my buddy Isaac's blog), and who I last saw in the lobby of the Intar/Interart building when Atticus and Justin and I were loading out our LA FEMME set to drive it to 59e59 and Eduardo was waiting for the elevator, which we were breaking, and he walked up to the second floor and got it unbroken for us.

Theater. Yow. Small world.

Michael is writing a play for our Minstrel Show. This is a post I intended to write a few days ago, when I first read about The Princess Grace Statue, but I wanted to wait until I heard back from Michael who emailed me today to assure me his Minstrel Play is on its way so now I can relax and blog about how thrilled I am that Michael is writing for us. Last year he wrote a piece called Over Exposed for 1000 Words which Mary Kate Burke directed and a few months prior to that I directed a short piece of his, entitled off season for Prospect Theater Company. It starred Pat Dempsey, Lori McNally, and Joey Williamson and was the hardest stream of consciousness text three actors have ever had to learn. Plus they performed drenched in water (in an old church where the only tap water was freezing cold), I believe Joey was shirtless, and all three of them faced the audience dead on the entire time. It was a terrifying piece of text about thrill seekers riding out Hurricane Katrina in which Joey had an incredible long impassioned speech about the exhilaration of fear that he never quite learned all the words of. Next time you see him say "Screamhole". He'll know what you mean. And he'll shake with terror and scream like a bichon.

All this is by way of saying Michael's writing is so exciting and so angry and so funny and scenes are often beautiful tapestries of poetry, with characters finishing each others' phrases, lines repeated, and varied, and changed, and then repeated again, they are intense and they are wordy. He plays with text in a hyper-real way. It sounds natural but it's heightened. It lives in our reality and just above it. It's beautiful to listen to, challenging to work on, and a bitch to memorize.

Of course his contributions to theater don't stop there. When we first met Michael he was primarily directing, and now he serves as the Artistic Director of Cornerstone in LA. And he is still finding the time to write for our little company here in New York.

I'm so grateful that we have the opportunities to work with artists like Michael. It enriches our company. By continuing to reach out to other artists besides the actors we always work with we are able to create diverse work instead of enjoying a teeny tiny Shalimar theater bubble. It's important to keep our own little artistic community strong and thriving and it's also incredibly important to continue to contribute to the larger theatrical community, which I hope we are able to achieve in our own ways.

All this is by way of saying CONGRATULATIONS MICHAEL! There is noone more deserving of that statue than you.

as bad as it gets

We got spanked. Again.

And we then got this from Hairline:

La Femme Est Morte or Why I Should Not F**k My Son

In direct contrast to the other production at this year's Fringe which recounts the tragic Greek myth of Phaedra in the much more conventional tradition of Racine, Shalimar's version of events brings the story kicking and screaming like a Jerry Springer guest right into the modern age. Their production takes in gaudy Heat magazine style celebrity glamour, the phenomenon of mobile communications and the scourge of sensationalist paparazzi journalism, as well as the brute force of American foreign politics, as it recounts the tale of the love triangle between Queen Phaedra, her husband Theseus and his son from a former marriage, Hippolytus.

The audience is impressed by the lively contemporary musical score, containing a number of up to date chart toppers by various over produced manufactured pop artists, performed live by a perfectly vacuous trio including the musical director Joey Williamson as the lead singer. The trio also double up as the vulture like media manipulators, feasting on the rotting carcass of society’s morals with a maniacal pleasure. Excellent characterisation in all honesty. In addition to this, Phaedra is presented as a regular Jenny from the Block bling queen, bored and lonely wife of a military man gone to war, Neevee is her PR and stylist, Theseus is the all American buzz cut GI Joe, and Hippolytus is here seen as a confused, hormone ridden adolescent frat boy who pours out his heart to his buddy X over boxing spars. The performances are excellent.

A rollercoaster of a play, the acting is great, and give a real depth to the production, using a mixture of traditional and modern dialogue to satirise today’s shiny consumerised, celebrity obsessed society, as well as highlighting the gung-ho approach to world affairs that modern America has made its name with. “America hates losers…We are He-men”.


4/5

Robert May


Truthfully, the reviews don't hurt anymore. I deeply believe in this show and the work we have done on it, so it has become masochistically intriguing, reading what people think of us. Jen always said this play is love it or hate it and I always thought that was bullshit. We encountered very little hate in New York. Pretty much everyone who saw it at Fringe and at 59e59 understood the satire, were thrilled by the spectacle, and were very willing to ride with us. The reviews here are not mixed, they are split down the fucking middle. Not a single three star review, they are all either 4 stars (spectacularly magical genius satire!) or 2 stars (let's assassinate The Shalimar from behind while they're walking away, those fucking motherfuckers).

The split is thrilling. I mean who wants to make middle of the road work? Is it not better to enrage than induce apathy? However, the thing with apathy, is it's expected. In this enormous arts festival if Joe Shmoe reads a 3 star review that is middling at best, he may still attend that show to see the fair writing, decent acting, and adequate costumes. But if Mr. Shmoe reads a review that calls out a piece as "a dud of epic proportions" and "a truly awful, misguided and forgettable hour of theatre", well it is just harder to justify seeing that piece of shit.

Whereas I find it entertaining to read the reviews by people who absolutely refused to go with us to the exciting world this play lives in, reviews by little rich girls from Conneticut who were longing to see a piece of reverential Greek Tragedy, and reviews by fucking FOOD CRITICS who admitted the not knowing that much about theater (!!!), I also fear the power of the print. I know our work is good. The 30 or so people who populate our audience on a daily basis are nothing but complimentary. We were nominated for a prestigious award. We have more 4 star reviews than I can even remember off the top of my head. And yet, people read these slams and decide we are not worth an hour of their festival weekend.

And who can blame them? When was the last time I read a positively shitty review and went to see the show anyway, figuring the reviewer was just misguided? It doesn't happen. And yet, I wouldn't change this. I wouldn't erase our 2 star reviews from memory. I wouldn't go back and remove the meat. I wouldn't change a damb thing about this show to make it easier to understand or stomach. This is by far the best work most of us have done and I stand by pushing some boundaries and making a mess.

And fuck it. Today the Financial Times ran a huge picture of us and called us "the most exciting young American company I have seen up here so far this century."

Eat that with your ground beef. Give a 2 star show a fucking chance. Maybe it's genius. Maybe it's a piece of shit. But I guarantee you won't be able to take your eyes off it.

Result Oriented

We opened tonight.

We opened our show with eight actors, 40 props, 3 messy food props, 5 big moments of stage combat, 3 musical instruments, 3 brand new handheld mics, and hundreds of light and sound cues. And we had never done a run through.

We have a love / hate relationship with festivals. They are a great way to audience build and do theater on the cheap. But often we find ourselves sacrificing certain elements of our show. Beauty. Safety. You know.

I will say, this is probably the best run festival we have ever been a part of, in the snazziest building, with the best air conditioning and the most competent tech crew. But even with all those good vibes, it was scary for everyone to go on stage in front of a fair sized audience having only done a cue to cue.

It was rocky and it was great. We are prepped to run for a month in Edinburgh so it's a priceless opportunity for us to use this week at 59e59 to iron out kinks. All that said, it is so scary sitting in the back of the house and feeling like you've just sent eight actors to the lions. They were amazing in defeating their impossible task. I was a bit of a case.

Anyway, here are pictures. The show is gorgeous. Serge took these last night at tech.


















boxing











It was a long night.

Viva Sweden

So I've been freaking the fuck out about our one set piece. The bed. Yes, as far as sets go we are often quite minimal. Last time we went to Edinburgh we got by with rolling up the black curtain that was serving as crossover masking, setting two rolling chairs on the stage and hanging this metal grate thing on the back wall. I think we found that on the floor in the space. Low maintenance.

This show has no less than 25 hand props, 3 musical instruments, 2 costumes per person, 3 body mics, and a large rolling bed. So the issue comes up of how the hell to get all of this stuff to Scotland.

Well, the props can go in luggage. One of the instruments we will have to buy over there, the costumes go in the luggage, the body mics go in the hand luggage. And the bed. Oh the bed.

See, we're doing a short run here at 59e59 that ends the day before we go. So using something here and then shipping it is not really an option. If we can use it and then stuff it in a suitcase, well that works, but for the life of me I could not figure out how to get a bed to fold down into a small square. I wish I was as ingenious as Banana Bag and Bodice who, when faced with the prospect of doing The Sewers in Dublin without their stunning set that included 3 detailed walls, a roof, and a million doors, holes, and secret openings of magic, decided to recreate their entire set out of CARDBOARD. Cardboard that FOLDED DOWN AND FIT INTO A SUITCASE.

Shit.

Not only do we need a bed that rolls, but we need it to be structurally sound enough to carry the weight of at least 5 people while rolling. It should also have some prop storage underneath. Oh and beautiful. Let it be beautiful.

I sat here, on the futon, late one night, searching UK websites, actually looking for cots or something to stick in our flat in Edinburgh (we are just a couple of beds short of appropriate boundaries). I cruised Argos and Tescoe and finally found my way to Ikea.

Ikea.

IKEA.

Of course. They have Ikea. We have Ikea. Every country has roughly the same shit at their Ikea. I could buy the bed here, we could make the set, it could be amazing, and when we get to Edinburgh we can buy the same bed at their Ikea, build the rest of it there and we will have the exact same set piece.

Which is how on Tuesday Curtis and I found ourselves on a New Jersey Transit operation heading towards what can only be described as the promised land. Curtis is a brilliant opera designer and painter and he is a constant source of support for The Shalimar. He has let us rent out corners of his studio before for cheap. He has taken me paint shopping and taught me to goldleaf, which is the best thing ever ever EVER. He created the floor design for the recent production of stirring and then he came in and PAINTED IT. He and his amazing wife Julie come to our parties, donate to our cause, and laugh at all our jokes. They are good people. And Curtis agreed to come to Ikea with me to make sure I didn't buy a bed made out of tinker toys because it was the cheapest one they had.

We found a bed. And for my part, my pathetic little part, I worked on Curtis' artist statement for him. He's in the midst of making this beautiful series of dictator-based self-portraits and had hit a bit of a wall with his statement. It happens. So while he sketched pictures of beds and took measurements, I thought up innovative ways to explain the man behind the art.

It was a good day.

And now I'm off to buy lumber.

day job

I'm having one of those fucking days at work where I need to snarl at every customer. And they look at me like I am an absolute troll because they have asked me for coffee and instead of smiling and bouncing over to the machine I instead ignore them for 10-20 seconds, look at them like they are deeply inconveniencing me (hello, I'm searching slutty tops on ebay), ignore their requests for decaf, skim, soy, vanilla, splenda, or whatever bullshit they want to ruin their coffee with, and make their drinks with a look of total disgust/boredom/homicidal rage on my face. I'm lucky enough to work at a place where this actually passes for great customer service.

And the customers look at me with a mixture of fear (mission accomplished!) and bewilderment. Do I not know that it is my duty to serve them coffee and baked goods with an assholey smile on my face? Did I not realize when I woke up this morning that my only important task this day would be to make them their fucking half-caf three shot skim iced latte, just fill the cup 1/3 of the way with ice please because otherwise it, like, melts and my drink ends up all watery, you know?

Hey lady, you're drinking 16 ounces of skim milk. Your drink is going to taste like water no matter how much ice I put in it, YOU KNOW?

Today, as has been the case many times for the last few months, all I want to do is grab these customers and scream at them "THIS IS NOT WHAT I DO!" I will reach across the counter and grab them by the collar, pulling their face close to mine, "THIS IS NOT WHAT I AM!"

They will stammer and stutter, terrified of the sociopath behind the counter with butter knives a mere arms length away. They will atttempt to reason with me, "But you're the barista. This is your job. To make the coffee."

I roar. Possibly my face turns entirely red, my mouth opens to three times its normal size andn my eyeballs spin (we watched Evil Dead 2 last night). "I AM NOT A FUCKING BARISTA. I AM A WRITER. I DIRECT PLAYS. I MAKE THEATER. I HAVE IDEAS. I HAVE AN EDUCATION."

They are shaking, wishing they hadn't stepped out for their coffee break, wishing they had indulged in a machine-made hot chocolate in the break room of the company where they do tech support. Or develop websites. Or micro-manage other people who do those things. And I see their fear and their ultimate dissatisfaction with the lives they chose, and I set them down gently. I release their collar. I pour their coffee. They stare at me warily. As I hand it to them I say,

"You don't know me. You don't know what I can do. You don't know how talented I am. I am not just someone who makes coffee so do not look so surprised that I am fucking miserable to be standing behind this counter. This is six hours out of my day that I cannot be doing what I love, what I am good at, that I cannot contribute to society in the way I am supposed to. Do not look at me with the expectation that simply because I stand here and you stand there, I am a servant with a servant's mentality."

They are looking at their feet. They are a bit ashamed. Other people in the cafe are staring. So I smile at them, the big smile, the REAL smile, the smile that breaks across my face the minute I walk through this door out onto the street, away from the necessity of working for hourly pocket change, and I ask them, "Did you want anything else today?"



6/22/07
I need to make a slight ammendment to the above post. I must mention that I have many a regular customer whom I truly adore. There are customers who brighten my day every time they come in. A short list of them would be Rex, Frank, Bill, Curtis, Strummer Joe, The King of Spain and his wife, Food Dude, Jesse, Gerry, Erik, and a whole bunch more whose names I don't know. It's just that for every great customer who really takes an interest, there is one who treats me like dirt. Similar to bartenders, for every amazingly interesting drunk who is full of wonderful stories, humor, and compassion, there is a bachelorette party from Long Island demanding that you make blow job shots and dance on the bar.

nightmare

So right before I woke up this morning (for a phone appointment with our general manager, SCAMP) I had a wee nightmare. In this evil dream, we were all getting on the plane to Edinburgh. We had our suitcases, we were all on the same flight, we were ready. Except it was June 29th instead of July 29th. We were going over a month early. And for some reason I didn't realize this (and nor did anyone else) until we were on the plane. When we were halfway over the Atlantic I started panicking. We haven't rehearsed the show! Our apartment isn't going to be available! We didn't buy any of the sound equipment we needed to buy in America because it's cheaper there! We have performances in New York starting July 24th! What have we done!

When we got off the plane I had a voicemail from Adam Rapp. It said, "Hey Shoni. I really want to donate to your show but I hear you guys left already. A month early. What the fuck are you thinking?"

Then we headed to our flat, even though by now I knew we were screwed. When we got there it was empty but people's stuff was in all the rooms. Clothes, books, bedding...we just sort of wandered from room to room. Joey started moving a bed. I was like, we HAVE to fly back to New York. We can't stay here. SCAMP showed up and were like, Shoni, what have you done?

Other recent dreams:

Gary (baker of all things delicious) recently had a dream about me. I got very excited when he told me this, but it wasn't that kind of dream. Basically he and Joey were out of town and I was staying in their place. And they had this yummy cheesecake with berries on it in the fridge. And I ate the whole thing except for one bit which I left out on the table to rot. They found this when they came home as well as a bunch of little ramekins of chewed up food that I had left out all over the place. So Gary called me and was yelling at me that this was unacceptable to which my response was, "This CONVERSATION is unacceptable."

Hm.

I had dinner with Camilo tonight at Ariba!Ariba! and he told me that I was recently in his dream too. In this dream he was in a play but didn't know any of his lines. He kept having to run offstage to look at his script. But that's not the climax of the dream. No, the climax of this hateful dream is AFTER that when he sat me down and said, "Shoni, we need to talk." Apparently it was very serious and dramatic and he said to me, "I really hate it when you and Kim come over and go through my fridge and eat all my food."

End of dream.

What the fuck. Who knew these gays had so much hostility building towards me and my eating habits.

And will I continue to have panic dreams about Edinburgh up until the festival? Maybe. Though they are totally unfounded. I woke up from my Edinburgh nightmare, had some coffee, and had a lovely phone meeting with SCAMP. I then emailed a bunch of stuff to our UK Press Rep and bought our plane tickets. Really all is right with the world.

So why am I afraid to go to sleep?

research

I felt I should point out that besides frantically raising money, The Shalimar also makes plays. In case I haven't physically shaken you in hopes that money will fall from your pockets and screamed in your ear how great this show is, let me tell you a little about LA FEMME EST MORTE or Why I Should Not F!%# My Son. It's about America. And celebrity. And the fact that our country is at war yet we obsess over Shilo Jolie-Pitt and whether or not Lindsay Lohan has fucking died yet. Seriously, when will she just die? The play is based on Phaedra, so there is also some good old fashioned incest and religious guilt. Really it's about what happens here in America when our men go to war. So here are the videos I'm watching as inspiration. I will warn that they are not all for the faint of heart.

(Sidebar. It's pretty interesting to me what people post on youtube. It's interesting that I can't see the war on the news but anyone, including my seven year old brother, can watch it on the fucking internet.)

cold hands, cold feet...

Last Monday was cold. Wind whipping, lips chapping, fingertips freezing, the whole deal. I took a trip downtown to pick up some keys. Then I took a trip to midtown to pick up Pat and husband. Got more keys. Then Pat and husband and I walked three avenues and ten streets in the blistering cold to the truck. The Cupcake Cafe truck, painted blue with a sloppy mural of animals all over it, is a little bigger than a UPS truck. It has no shocks. The doors don't really work. It leaks anti-freeze. I got into the driver's seat. My feet barely reach the pedals.

We spent the day moving stuff into our new chashama space, to make it more liveable. We rehearsed there once two weeks ago and it was so cold (due to space heaters being off all day and the near-zero weather outside) we decided we couldn't go back until we had curtains to close the room off and a chair or two to sit on.

So on Monday Pat and husband and I went to the chashama warehouse on 57th and 12th where we used to rehearse and loaded chairs, tables, and scrap wood into the truck. I had a major nostalgic experience in there. It's where we rehearsed Bad Girls Good Writers and the Photo Plays and did a few LA FEMME readings. We shared the space with Banana, Bag, and Bodice, one of our favorite companies. They had built their box set for The Sewers on one end of the space while we shifted around beds given to us by The Debate Society at the other end of the space. It was summer and things are always easier in the summer. We weren't saddled with the need to raise $40K to get to Edinburgh. We were going to have an easy time of it. We were creative and happy. It was hot out. I would sit in the entrance of the space, a driveway, and watch cars on the West Side Highway.

On Monday our fingers were freezing. We were sniffling. It was fucking cold. After the 57th Street stop we made our way into Harlem to pick up an air conditioner a guy from the Directors Lab list was giving away. I wanted to give it to Interart, but Josh was uptown, so we brought it to chashama instead. We unloaded everything there, at our space on 126th and Amsterdam, drove back to midtown, ate chicken fingers, went home, limbs frozen. I had a sore throat.

On Tuesday at 9am, I met the indefatigable Chris Illing inside the 145th St subway. We traveled to Long Island City together and found ourselves in Materials for the Arts. We loaded up on pieces of rug, big gray blanket-y pieces of material, and some windows that I couldn't let get away. Cabbed up to 126th and Amsterdam, dropped off these pieces, ate food, I was home drinking chamomile tea and praying for health by 2 in the afternoon.

At rehearsal that night Jen walked in sick as a dog. I kept my illness to myself, not wanting to call the rehearsal. Matt and Rachel hung the curtains, closing in the room, raising the temperature ten degrees. I popped tylenol when no one was looking. Jen sounded like a drag queen. The next night she asked to leave early and I made my displeasure clear. Matt is away for the next ten days out of a very necessary necessity and we didn't have the option of letting people go. Even if they were sick. Even if they could barely speak. Even if they were making the rest of us sick by being there.

I have never been more aware of our economic instability as a company than I am now. I feel our weakness as a structure, I feel us affected by the elements. Our space is too cold to rehearse in! But we can't go anywhere with heat because we can't afford more than this. I never understood the truth of suffering for your art (a bullshit phrase, but I can feel it a little now) until I stopped working for a paycheck in an effort to better serve the company I am building. We are getting ready to take a huge show overseas for a month. It is a great show and it will get great response. It's a show that could have a life for a long time. It's a show that audiences told us over and over that they fucking loved. We have $184 in the bank account right now. It's winter and we're looking for ways to stay warm in our rehearsal space. Will we use that scrap wood to make rehearsal furniture or will we just burn it for warmth?

aging artfully...

My first intern just got his first intern. Does this mean I'm getting old?

same bullshit, different day

It's been a long week of making theater for no money. I spent hours yesterday working on a proposal that I had to run to a theater that may or may not even accept the damn thing because it's late. We checked with them and they said they would take it late but then I didn't have time to work on it because I was in rehearsal, doing rewrites, buried in production stuff, dealing with every other element of running a fucking theater company, so I didn't have time to work on the proposal to get the free space at the prestigious theater, which we desparately fucking need, so the proposal has ended up REALLY late. But I busted my ass yesterday for 6 hours, writing writing writing, plus the subway ride and the dashing through streets of New York and then dashing back to the subway to get to another theater to do a walk through. I cancelled a meeting with a press rep and I didn't go running. It was exhausting. And it pissed me off.

Because we can't make theater without the hand outs. Without the grants and the residencies and the begging and the free labor from good friends and the artists who work way below their standards for us. I'm starting to feel like a street urchin. Or a slum lord. And in taking all that time to fill out applications, write narrative, compile bios, print copies of reviews, get more DVDs burned, when is there the time to make the work that we are asking for support for? I'm too busy compiling company data and writing cover letters that are basically fucking begging for support than to work on my craft (sorry to use the dumbass word) or just make my fucking plays better. Please think I'm good enough. Oh please like my work enough. All I can do is hope that my application stands out in a teeteringly tall pile of applications by other collaborative ensemble experimental edgy (insert dumbass downtown theater adjective of choice here) theater companies.

It's demeaning. I just want to make the plays.

After writing all day and rushing and running and kissing some ass and agreeing to things I didn't want to agree to because people are doing me favors and letting Camilo buy me dinner because I am BROKE and feeling guilty about it because he does all our graphic design work for practically free, I was almost ready to throw in the towel. There are days where it seems too hard. Like I'll never make a living at this on my terms. Like I'll have to go to grad school to get contacts or I'll have to become a director for hire and stop making my own work. But my friends who have done those things aren't making livings at it either. They struggle too. We're all just trying to make the work, make a living. Maybe be happy here and there. Or at least be ok with things. Maybe I should just work full time at Cupcake Cafe again. I KNOW I'm good at making coffee.

I did have one transcendent experience yesterday, when I watched The Real Housewives of Orange County for the first time ever. I think I maybe saw God.

Oh and it snowed. It was amazing. So perhaps things aren't so bad.

Dude, I Saw Her First

Check out the Times Review below. Sound familiar? I do believe The Shalimar did this play this summer. We called it LA FEMME EST MORTE or Why I Should Not F!%# My Son....need proof? Compare our photos (the next four) with their photo...leopard print dress anyone? Anyone?







GREEK TRAGEDY WEARS A NEW, BRASH MASK

By Jonathan Kalb

Published: January 24, 2007

Sophocles’ “Women of Trachis” is packed with sex, gore, desperation and verbal beauty. If it isn’t staged very often, one reason is that the plot hinges on a twist that is hard to swallow today. Why would Deianira, Heracles’ adoring and sensible wife, believe that such a glaringly suspicious character — a centaur that Heracles shot for trying to rape her — would then want to help the couple stay together by giving Deianira a magical love potion?

Hilary McHone

Debargo Sanyal and Heidi Schreck, front, and behind, from left, Jodi Lin, Birgit Huppuch and Rebecca Lingafelter, in “Women of Trachis.”

Readers’ Opinions

Forum: Theater

In Kate E. Ryan’s delightful and perceptive contemporary adaptation, directed by Alice Reagan and produced by Target Margin Theater as part of its Hellenic Laboratory series, obliviousness becomes the play’s central theme, elevated to a kind of hubris. Deianira, played with fabulously distracted lucidity by Heidi Schreck, is a desperate housewife-cum-celebrity-spouse in a sleek, leopard-print dress, who literally itches with longing for her roving-eyed, absentee husband.

The chorus consists of three dreamy, immature young women (Birgit Huppuch, Jodi Lin and Rebecca Lingafelter) in pink dresses and flower bracelets, who drink Diet Coke out of a plastic cooler and react to the increasingly serious situation with twittering, trivialities and bromides. It’s never quite clear why such a smart, worldly queen would surround herself with such airheads, but that problem fades away in the end because the point apparently is that obtuseness, whatever its source, is fatal, particularly to women.

Ms. Ryan is far from the first playwright to update a Greek play with pop songs, casual modern speech and references to things like Xanax and computer games. There’s a special psychological alertness and pungency to this mélange, though, that Ms. Reagan shrewdly strengthens in her superbly cast and infectiously energetic one-hour production.

The two roles deliciously played by Debargo Sanyal — the royal son Hyllus, as a snooty teenager in a golf shirt and hiking boots, and the royal gofer Lichas, as a snide celebrity assistant in white glasses and shoes — are reason enough to see the show.

My one dramaturgical quibble is with the reductive portrayal, in the final scene, of Heracles (Todd d’Amour) dying when the supposed love potion turns out to be poison. Portraying him merely as a bad daddy and a serial adulterer with a secret taste for genital mutilation reads as a cheap shot beside all Ms. Ryan’s other whimsically acute decisions. Luckily, the swipe is fleeting, and never completely drains the ending of its hard-earned gravity.

“Women of Trachis” continues through Feb. 3 at the Ohio Theater, 66 Wooster Street, SoHo; (212) 352-3101.

time is of the essence...

We received a space grant from the Laguardia Performing Arts Center for the play we are workshopping with Saviana Stanescu. Basically they give us 40 hours or so of space in their theater and we show whatever we have piddled out in that time.

Oh the space residency. A blessing and a curse really. A blessing because it makes you make work. A curse because it makes you make work. On a time-line.

Because what is the ideal? The ideal is that we have our own space. Something we can rehearse in and perform in and have an office in. Something a bit convertible. Edgy but with comfortable seating. Working toilet. Heat in the winter. Sprung floors would be nice, but we have fared well on concrete before...And with the space we have money. Not a lot of money but enough to get us all in the room at the same time without too much fight. Just something to make acting more worthwhile than catering, which of course it is, but there is the necessary evil of paying rent. So...

So in this fantasy we have all the time and space in the world. So we can create plays on our time, at our leisure, when inspiration strikes, we are there. We had a whisper of that this summer thanks to the Women's Interart Annex. We had 24 hour access to that space for a month at a VERY low price. During the day I would pop in to write. The actors would come a few hours before rehearsal to warm up. We could leave our growing collection of musical instruments there. And at 11pm when rehearsal was over but Joey and I were just getting inspired, we would blast the sound system and stay until 3am, creating the musical numbers for the show. It was freeing to be able to work at our own pace.

This space grant is great because it lights a fire under our asses. We have 3 other shows coming up in the next 8 months, a remount, a ten-minute play extravaganza, and a re-workshopped re-created re-mount that will go overseas. Starting a new play from scratch was getting continually pushed to the back burner. But then we got this grant. And we had three weeks to organize ourselves, do our research, make a schedule, and get our asses out to Queens so we could make some fucking theater.

But it's still hard. The space is great, but there is no money involved and we are still renting some space in Manhattan to rehearse so we are putting money out there. The space is great but it is in Queens, so rehearsing on weeknights is all but futile with everyone commuting from their temp jobs. Basically your will to live DISAPPEARS somewhere on the 7 Train. The space is great, but we have to provide our own audience, which is challenging already. Work in a scenic ride on the 7 and you've got yourself a problem.

But again, the space is GREAT. It's a 220 seat black box/proscenium. It is incredible to be able to rehearse on a stage. Somehow that always makes everything better. Everything looks like a show when it is on a stage. And the fact that we have it for free is so...luxurious. When we are there it is amazing to get caught up in making work. To be able to break for lunch and not worry about losing money on a $20/hr rehearsal room. It is heart-breaking that these are the factors that go into making theater, but this is the reality for a small theater company with no trust funds. We keep ourselves ready and available for when someone calls and says, "Want something for free?" And when they make that call, we make theater.

An American girl, an Australian girl, and a Polish woman walk into a sauna...

Setting: The locker room at Crunch.
Time: Last night. 7pm.

When the following symbol is used ---- it signifies silence on the part of the speaker, combined with a look that means I have no idea what you are talking about, you American fool.
____________________________________________________________________

After a particularly rough hip-hop class on a particularly cold day, Shoni decides to step into the sauna at Crunch. She towels up and walks into the brightly lit wooden box. Just as she relaxes on the top bench, for maximum heat, a girl walks in.

Girl: There's something wrong with this. The heat is actually going down, not up.
Shoni: Fuck.


Shoni and Girl step out of the sauna and fiddle with the buttons until the temperature begins to rise. They step back into the sauna and lay down on adjescent benches. Shoni closes her eyes. Girl begins to breath deeply. Silence. Silence. Then.

Girl: Have you ever used the pool here? The Crunch pool?
Shoni: Yeah. It's small.

Silence. Silence. Then.

Girl: (In an unmistakeably Australian accent) Are the spinning classes here any good?
Shoni: They're ok.

Shoni thinks to herself, SERIOUSLY? Will this stranger talk to me the entire time I'm in here? Then she remembers her New Years resolution, shich was to have more joy. And this girl might be fun and nice and interesting and good to know. Sometimes it's good to know Australians. So.

Me: What are you doing here in the states?
Australian Girl: I came to study. I'm an actress.
Me: Ah! Where did you study?

And thus begins a rather lengthy conversation on the arts in Australia versus America. The Cate Blanchett Hedda Gabler comes up. Australian dance comes up. Shoni mentions Japanese dance she plans to see this weekend. More harmless artistic chatter. Then.

Shoni: Why leave Australia?
Australian Girl: There's just no culture there. Because it's so far away. The stuff that comes there, it's like Madonna, and tickets are like $200. Just the things there are to do and see in America, in New York. It's really. But you have to be so ruthless, such a survivor.
Shoni: As an immigrant?
Australian Girl: No, as an American.

An American girl walks in. She is clearly horrified that the two naked girls in the sauna are chatting away. She sits on a low bench and stretches her feet out in front of her. She glances quickly at Shoni and the Australian girl looking vaguely nervous.

Shoni: What do you mean?
Australian Girl: Just not having insurance is so scary. You know to come from a country with a health system and then when I got here, I mean I have a green card now, but the first time I got sick, it was before I had insurance, and I went to the doctor and it was, like, $500. And I was like, you're kidding, that's my savings, and the doctor was like, yup, that's what it costs. And I realized I had to be careful, I had to be aware of my health. I mean it's ridiculous. How does a single mother or something like that, how do people afford it?
Shoni: They don't get sick.

A well-preserved Polish woman in her 50s enters. She is wearing just a thong. She stands right in front of the stones, fanning the hot air up into her face.

Australian Girl: And appearances here are more important. It's way dressier than Australia.
Shoni: No way! We're the slobbiest country in the world!
Australian Girl: Australia is like really casual.
Polish Woman: (with thick Polish accent). Maybe you think that but no. When I move here, I live in Brighton Beach now, this is Russian neighborhood. When I move here, very sloppy, yes. But now, thirteen years later, very dressy.
Australian Girl: It's all about shoes. And bags.
Polish Woman: And getting nails done and hair done.

The silent American girl wiggles her perfectly manicured toenails. Her make-up is perfect. She appears to not be sweating. The Polish woman sits on the corner of the box the stones are in.

Australian Girl: It's totally different here. Adjusting to the culture is hard. Living hand to mouth, like being a cocktail waitress when I was in school, it's different.
Shoni: I wish I had had my tape recorder. I am doing a play about immigration and we're interviewing immigrants. This would have been great to record.

An Asian woman walks in naked. She lays down on the lower bench, her head next to the American girl's ass. The American girl sits very still.

Australian Girl: What is your play about?
Shoni: Well, immigration and love. Like green card marriages.
Australian Girl: Oh! I'm one of those. I mean, not really, it was a REAL marriage, but you know.
Polish Woman: YOU are doing play about immigrants? You are American! What do you know about immigrants?


Every fiber of Shoni's being shudders with fear of being an utter fraud and making a huge mistake.

Shoni: Well my husband is an immigrant. He's Scottish.
Polish Woman: What do you know about it.
Shoni: Well we have a Romanian playwright writing the play.
Polish Woman: ---
Shoni: She's really good.
Polish Woman: It is like this guy Borat. He knows nothing about it. He make fun of these immigrants and makes money off of them and laughs at them and he knows nothing about it.

Oh fuck, Shoni thinks to herself, are you really bringing up Borat?

Polish Woman: Why does he not make this film in Britain? No he makes it in poor country and pays them five dollars a day, seven dollars a day.
Australian Girl: I know, he's awful, it's not funny.

The Asian Woman begins rubbing her temples, aggressively.

Polish Woman: I mean, I have not seen it, but what I read about it, he makes fun of these people, and pays them nothing. They think oh, I want to make movie, but it will be so expensive in England, so let's go to different country and pay nothing. And he makes fun of them.
Shoni: Well, I think he's really making fun of Americans. And there are elements of the comedy that's really subversive, more so than, say, Employee of the Month or something, which is really just an example of Americans being willing to settle for something completely sub-par and facile and laugh at it anyway.
Polish Woman: ----

Silence. Silence. Then.

Australian Girl: Wow. We've been in here 40 minutes. Are you hot?
Shoni: Yeah, I'm pretty hot.
Australian Girl: I'm going to get out.
Shoni: Can I get your email? I'd love to interview you for our play.
Australian Girl: Sure!

Shoni and Australian Girl leave the sauna, followed by Polish Woman. Shoni gets Australian Girl's email and leaves the gym, with the Polish Woman's words echoeing in her ears.

YOU ARE AMERICAN. WHAT DO YOU KNOW ABOUT IMMIGRATION?