Please enjoy this small video. We can't fully express how much everyone's help means to us. But we try.
Where we are now
Just one more rehearsal until we show. The material feels like a joyful pile that comes in and out of focus. In the meantime, Jed hangs lights while I handle business. It's a late night night.
Springtime comes to Philly
It's an amazing thing to go into these deep intense rehearsal phases. The whole world kind of stops existing. All I think about is learning the new song, deepening character choices, sending e-cards and continuing to break open the material. Meanwhile we get these stories through some sort of reality that continues without us: bombings in Boston, lock-downs, a fertilizer plant explodes in Waco, Congress blocks gun legislation. I start to wonder what is so important about us making plays; what good these funny pursuits are for the world at large. Then I notice these cherry blossoms that seem to have burst open over night and remember that all of us are living the best lives we know how and that if we stay true to that. . . Well, you can't ask for much more.
Yes!
And 84 degrees F.
PMA Play Day
Yesterday was the PVD crew's first full day in PHL. We thought it was only fitting to head straight to the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
While we were there to dip into the atmosphere of the museum as a way to move back into rehearsal for Enlightenment, it was impossible to ignore how stunning the PMA is.
It's also important to take the time at a new museum to notice the small details in branding and design that distinguish each place. We really likes the PMA's metal buttons. Aram said they used to be round. . .
And of course, we were sneaking peaks at security guards too. . .
PHL Here We Come!!!
That stack of khakis in the foyer can only mean one thing. We are about to hit the Rhode Island roads, head South and join our comrades in P.H.L.
The Collective Unconscious
Two articles have come out in the past few days that make us feel caught up in some cultural zeitgeist. The first came up on the Pig Iron blog today about a new Annie Baker show at Playwrights Horizons called "The Flick". Pig Iron linked to it in reference to their recent show "Zero Cost House." In our world, however, it all felt hyper-relevant to "Enlightenment": a three-person play, two men and a woman, about a boring job filled with lots of stillness. Annie Baker's play is about people who work in a movie theater rather than an art gallery, other than that. . .  The similarities aside, the article is all about how much audiences have hated the play because of all the silence. Weird seeing as all the feedback from our showings was to add more silence. Perhaps Playwrights Horizons doesn't have the right audience for our show either. . .
Another amazing piece of press that has come out in the past seven days is a huge spread on museum security guards in the New York Times last Thursday. It held everything that thematically is our show.
When combined these two pieces of writing somehow create the play we haven't completed yet. This either bodes amazingly for us and our piece: we are clearly creating the totally most current show of the moment in the moment it wants to be made. Or it's awful: we are just locked behind some sort of cultural curve and by the time we complete our show everyone will be into something else, like plays featuring only live snakes as actors or something. People will wonder how we ever got away with being such copycats. Â Time will tell. Best just keep making.
Click here to read the article on the silent play:
Avoiding Drama
It's all over the news right now -- the FBI has figured out who stole the paintings from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston 23 years ago. Ever since we started dreaming up our show on museum security guards, people have been bringing up this iconic museum heist to us. Then we explain that our interest lies in the liminal activity spent the majority of the time a museum guard works, not the exceptional once-in-a-lifetime honest-to-goodness art theft. Still and all, hearing about the discovery in the midst of making this show is kind of thrilling. It adds this extra layer of excitement. Not that the guards had much to do with it one way or the other, but because, as we have discovered time and again, no one champions the museum as much as the security guard. (Also no one complains about it as much. It's a complicated.)
Click and See
Is this too meta for you?
12:15am EST and I am finishing an email I'll schedule tonight to hit the Strange Attractor subscriber's in-box tomorrow. In the odd way the world works these days, you may actually see the email here on this picture of my screen on your screen on our blog before the image itself actually pops into your in-box. Squint hard and you' can read the whole thing. Or just wait until tomorrow morning, whichever. And of course if you're not on our mailing list, yada yada yada. File this one under the glamorous life of a self-producer!
Our virtual tour continues!
Seems we are now going to Puerto Rico! But, wait a minute... we want to go to Tenakee Springs, AK!!!
Help us!
One person's stupor is another person's reverie.
I don't remember exactly how I came across this idea - sometime while ruminating about enlightenment in a museum gallery and the long hours of alone-time guards must experience while working - but I thought it would be a great way to explore a kaleidoscope of shifting perspectives about differences in dreams, hopes and satisfactions, or dissatisfactions, while passing the time on the clock!
Closer to getting to Alaska!
Thanks Alaska peeps for getting us well on our way back to Alaska! As you can see on the United States Artists Projects webpage, our campaign to get back up North and out of the real world has us somewhere around N. Dakota, I believe. Stay tuned for updates on our real and virtual touring!
Between Phases
It feels far from summer here in New England, and yet this little video makes a lot of sense.
The next great idea for a show
Revolving set where the audience and performers walk (or run) an endless journey in space. Space the endless frontier
Thanks Doubltree Inn!
It's Fundraising Time, Kids!
Enlightenment on E Floor North is raising money! $10,000 to be precise, which, when combined with all the other funds we've raised from the Rasmuson Foundation, the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts, and the Maine Theater Fund, will bring our latest show on work and the museum security guard to Philadelphia, Southeast Alaska, back to New England, and beyond. If you have a few dollars to kick in, we'd so appreciate it. Plus, because we're raising the funds through USA Projects, we've been given matching funds from the Rasmuson Foundation and all of your donations are tax deductible!
NYC
In Hell's Kitchen.
When Your Company Lives Far Apart Your Exchange of Information Changes (Subtitled, D'uh)
We just had our first meeting since everybody left Providence. We've been emailing each other fairly non-stop, getting ready for a fundraising campaign, getting some grants together, putting the finishing touches on our plans for Philly, but tonight was the first time we made a date to meet on google hang-out to talk. Which is nice. Usually these end up being pretty long, but somehow this one. . . Well, maybe we'd just been spending so much time emailing there wasn't much to talk about. Or maybe we're still too in-the-middle of all the fundraising and finishing to actually stop and chat. Also, Aram forgot about it and was in NYC and so when you're one member down, it's never quite clear what you should and shouldn't talk about. . .
Anyway, my favorite part of the chat was that Roblin's son Arlo really really really wanted his dad to get back to playing Karate/Ninja games and so the background of our meeting was peppered with Arlo making loud Karate sounds. At one point Roblin asked him to be quiet and then Arlo paused. A few moments later these little whispered Karate sounds came through over the speakers. "heeeee-yaaaaaa." (whisper whisper)
I wish I'd recorded it for you or even taken a picture of this meeting, but alas, my mind was elsewhere. Instead, please enjoy this photo of a google hang out past.
Aw, Pawtucket
Here is the space in which we began the whole guardz process - the Pawtucket Armory. There seemed to be an armory above every river drainage in Rhode Island. Some good ol' American history set in stone. Anyhoo, it was a great space to both create ideas within and propose a blank E Floor North - that is the floor in the museum that we have been assigned to guard, if you were wondering. And also where a little or a lot of enlightenment will happen for anyone adventurous enough to discover that gallery of space - or perhaps just get lost and end up there. Doesn't really matter how you get there, just so long as you eventually find it.
And then there was BeerFest - in which we discreetly gathered some great audio of drunken bacchanalia:
Our friendly neighborhood guard
I had a nice cuppa and conversation with our new friend Guard Gary Jones (not a guard anymore!) about Phase I. We interviewed Gary at the beginning of our process of rehearsing Phase I and his generosity in sharing experiences (including the incredible "Polyester Guard-Dog Blues" he wrote while on duty) influenced our perspectives. Great guy, great ideas - worked in both Portland and Seattle for the art museums and now a colleague and neighbor with my bro, W. Scott. Thanks for the conversation, G!