Ever-so-slight Irony of the Day

It is my last day here and I ate lunch alone.

In other news Nancy bought me a Kitchen-aid Mixer as a going-away present.

I start at Avjet at 8:30a on Monday.

Last Day

It is my last day at this job and I am here alone. This is normal. I am alone here often, but it makes me think: next week when I am not here at this time, no one will be here. They have not yet hired a proper replacement. I spent perhaps 1 hour of my last two weeks training someone. She will be here 3 days a week less than 10 hours a week. Good luck, motherfuckers.

I got a little talkative last night with Testro. I guess I'm a bit of a lightweight. 2 beers and I'm slightly sloppy. How pathetic. As noted on this weblog on previous occasions: drinking in the middle of the week is not the smartest thing in the world to do.

Rehearsal #1

First rehearsal went very well. I'm crazy about Anthony. I think he's very interesting. Jean is great, and will, I think, be very funny. Eric is really spooky. He's a very nice young man, but I always get the impression that he's just not having any fun at all. Kevin is great. He's a little more emotional with the character than I want him to be, but they all are, really. This was an issue in Closer, too, if I remember correctly. Everyone just feels too much. The plays I pick are often about not feeling. Elizabeth understood this tightrope beautifully. Kevin and I get along perfectly, though, and we moved straight into the mode in which we work. He seems to be talking to me more than he usually does, which makes me feel even better about the work.

This play is very very funny. I had no idea it was this funny. "I make frantic sandwiches"?

Interviewer: What then?
Michael: What then.
Interviewer: What then?

My New Best Friend

An email from about fifteen minutes ago.

Hey Aaron. Here are an act 1 and 2 ground plan.
There's a black and white rendering too. Good luck!
Oh, just to let you know, you are a fucking genius for
casting Cyn as Delfina. I think thats what you did....
Anyhow, looking foward to the show--Im starting the
set on Thursday if everything looks OK. Thanks again.

Dustin

The rendering:

I Love Dave Grusin (If You Don't Know Who This Is, Please Look Him Up.)

I am not a morning person. And Carly Simon says "I'm a night owl honey / I sleep all day long." But I have got to get used to having a schedule like this. It's gonna be just like this when I work in Burbank, except maybe even a little worse because of the extra driving.

Linda asked me to help out with voice (and offered me money) and that's fine by me, but I don't even know if it's possible at this point. I told her I would help out this week and then we would see about next week. I'm expecting to barely make it to Pomona by 6:30p when my rehearsal starts.

I don't think I have ever felt this confident about a cast of mine. Certainly not since Gross Indecency and that was a long time ago. Things just fell into place for me to have this cast and I feel really great about it. The best thing is that I did what Linda wanted me to do, too. She was so pleased that I cast Anthony and Celeste. I can't tell you.

Good thing I visited Jaime yesterday and got her markout. My life would have been sad and coffeeless this morning were it not for her.

Lot's Wife from Caroline, or Change

Murder me God
Down in that basement
Murder my dreams
So I stop wanting
Murder my hope
Of him returning
Strangle the pride
That make me crazy
Make me forget
So I stop grieving
Scour my skin
'Til I stop feelin'
Take Caroline away
'Cause I can't be her
Take her away
I can't afford her
Tear out my heart
Strangle my soul
Turn me to salt
A pillar of salt
A broken storm and then
Caroline
Caroline
From the evil she done lord
Set her free
Set her free
Set me free
Don't let my sorrow
Make evil of me

Casting

I wound up casting eight people instead of seven and I think it's going to work out perfectly. For one thing, each of the interviewers will now be played by a different actor and each actor gets to play an interviewer, so I feel like I'm giving the chorus something to do.

Cast:
Michael: Kevin Gonzales
Livia: Jean something-or-other
Delfina: Cyn Pérez
Teddy: Jeremy Sherry
Chorus: Eric Isbell (because he needs to be in a show), Courtney Rowan (because she deserves to be in a show), Anthony Rutowicz (because he sooo should've been in Foreigner), and Celeste Hartman (because Linda really wanted me to cast her.)

Sally sort of talked me into casting four people as the chorus. I only needed three, but both boys were so good and then both girls were really good too. So, I had them read the chorus as a foursome and it felt very full. We shall see.

At any rate, I think it's a really good cast. No one is a true risk. Some are young, I grant you, but I don't think they will constitute real work like some people last year did in LLL or SIN.

I cannot really speak about how fucking excellent Cyn was tonight. She was fucking great. Seriously.

Cast Cast Cast!

I'm casting my show in less than 2 hours! I got a call from this girl Jean (sp?) about whom Elizabeth is always talking. Hopefully she will work out.

The rest of this is a really mean and bitchy joke I wish I'd thought of myself.

Someone: "Wow, with her and [Kow] you have all your bases covered."
Aaron: "Yeah, too bad there's no roles for livestock in the show."
Someone: "Wouldn't it be funny if you wrote a part for her and just had her stand in the corner and moo every once in a while?"

I Know Better or Even Superheroes Make Mistakes

Note to self: never allow yourself to be in any production cast by Linda Bisesti. She will, without exception, do a poor job of arranging the cast.

I will not whine about A Midsummer Night's Dream. It is my own fault, and I have not earned the right to complain about it. I will, however, share a few thoughts I had during the (evidently) obligatory read-thru of the play:

1.What is the point of verse if you ignore the verse lines? Prose is offset by punctuation. That is its only marker. If you only pay attention to the punctuation in verse, you might as well be speaking prose. What value, then, does the verse hold? None. Silly as fuck. Especially when you consider, dear reader, that it is highly likely that Shakespeare did not give us the punctuation used in modern editions at all, and that it was added by later editors and possibly even actors.

2. God bless Leslie Rivers for doing her homework before coming to the read-thru. She was one of very few who did.

3. Linda's friend Catherine doesn't know one damn thing about how to act Shakespeare. She may be a lovely human being, but please, Catherine, shut the fuck up.

4. The director (who is really very hot) told us that he had cut the Hell out of Act V (to which I said," thank Heaven"--its structure is almost identical to that of Love's Labour's Lost--cut that shit). But when we began to read Act V, I noticed that not one single solitary line had been removed from the version in Quarto 1. Did I miss something?

Heinz

I just want to try using my new LJ client that I downloaded for home use... (since I won't be on the work computers any time soon!)

At my parents tonight, I noticed that the ketchup was DelMonte and I laughed. I asked my parents if they were boycotting Heinz. Naturally they are. So funny. They're crackheads, of course. But man do I love hanging out with just my parents. Michael and Deborah left around 8p and my parents and I just sat around chatting. It was really nice.

Auditions

At some point, the director invariably asks, "Where did you find that piece?  It's quite extraordinary and such a perfect audition piece for this play."

The Right Answer: "After I read your play I thought about it for a long time and I couldn't quite come up with an audition piece that spoke to me, but then this monologue was in one of the plays I was reading just for fun a month or so ago and it just popped out at me and spoke to me and I knew that it was just what I needed."

The Wrong Answer: "Oh, I don't even know what play it's in.  It was in a book called Monologues for Actresses with Dialects or Funny Monologues for Character Actresses or The Ten Best Female Monologues of 1999 or Monologues to Do If You Want to Impress a Director Who's Directing a Play About White-Trash Characters.  One of those.   I looked through all of those, but I can't remember which one had this piece in it."

We saw some really good auditions and some fairly boring ones as well.  Actually, most of them were good.  A lot of people did Alan Ayckbourn.  There was some fun white-trash stuff.  Someone did William Congreve's The Way of the World (but points docked from her: she had no idea what play it was from or who'd written it, and she couldn't have played Lady Wishfort for another 20 years at least.)  And Jensen Kong did fucking Gaev from The Cherry Orchard!!!  And it was funny.  That was without doubt the best audition we saw. 

I feel pretty confident that I'll have enough people to do my show.  Everything is going to be okay.

Autumn

Further proof that a new season has begun... I had the following conversation with my boss at 4:10p this afternoon.

Aaron: Steve, I just got a call.  I've decided to take a job in Burbank.  They want me to start on the 30th. That's nine days from now and it's a Thursday.  I'll do the A/R before I go.

Steve: "Um, ok.  What time is Nancy in in the morning?  We need to have a staff meeting."

Aaron: Ok.

They loved me at this company.  I start next Thursday.

And I had the best fucking meeting with my set designer.  I swear to god I love him.  And he looks exactly like Daniel Radcliffe.  But the set is going to be fucking fabulous.  I even made a lot of changes to his existing set.  Like, I had things to say and helpful suggestions to make and shit with the logistics of his set.  It was the greatest meeting.  The lighting designer still has not read the play.  Sally and Dustin and I laughed about the play.  They like it a lot better now that they have read it two and three times.  They understand what the fuck it's about.  And I decided for sure: no read-through with this show either.  No one is going to get it on the first read, so it seems silly to read it.  Now that I think about it, I don't think the cast ever read Arcadia together during rehearsal.  Nope.  We didn't.  [God, that was a long time ago.]

And another random voice from the past called me today: this guy named Asa Kim who is/was a fighter pilot in the navy.  It was so good to hear from this guy, though, and he didn't want to talk my fucking ear off either, so that was nice too.

God Bless Tony Kushner

I told you that breeze on Sunday afternoon meant something. I worked seven and a half hours yesterday without batting an eye and then I came home, did my laundry, and popped in Angels in America. 

Fuck Joe Pitt.  Seriously.  And FUCK Louis.  Fuck them both.  There is no hate in my heart for the Roy Cohn of this play, but dammit there sure is hate for Joe and Louis.

All I can say about this miniseries (the first three hours of which I watched last night) is that it feels like an epic event while I watch it.  I feel as though I'm tapped into something much larger than myself.  This one of the most important things I've ever seen.  I've read it at least twice already, but this is some kind of incredible achievement.

After the first half, Brittney and Cyn came over and we drank two bottles of wine on my porch.  It was great fun.  Then I got out my comforter and put it back on the bed.  It was so warm and snuggly.  To think a week ago I was having trouble sleeping because it was so damned hot.  I think that's the main thing about winter.  In the summer, I toss and turn.  I can't get comfortable because I can't get cool.  In winter, I can sleep normally.  Turn the fire up.  Toss on the blankets.

God bless Starbucks coffee at home.

I hate the bus

It will be announced tomorrow morning that the previously scheduled tour of Wonderful Town has been pulled as the season-opener for the Ahmanson Theatre.  Instead, as the first show of the Ahmanson's new season, Tony-nominee Tonya Pinkins and Tony-winner Anika Noni Rose will be appearing in Caroline, or Change.  Tickets go on sale on 9/26.

Election: 2000

For a fascinating deconstruction of what happened in November 2000 in Florida, pick up October's issue of Vanity Fair (with the gorgeous Jude Law on the cover).  For me the most interesting part was the insider exploration of the workings of the United States Supreme Court and the alleged partisan behavior of Justice O'Connor.  In a definite departure from his usual magnanimous public persona, Justice Anthony Kennedy is transformed into a character of surprising gall and ambition.  Justice Ginsburg comes off as pallid and weak.  And, not surprisingly, right-wing idealogue Justice Scalia reads like a bully from a fifth grade recess.

The magazine's interview with Jude Law holds few revelations, but Dominick Dunne's musings on Ron Reagan Jr. and (his pet topic) Martha Stewart are worth the read.