Sunny Day, Sweeping the Clouds Away...

L.A. Day One

The trip to an airport was a trip and included a woman with a spiral beehive, who kept her cell phone to her ear and praised Jesus into the mouth piece during the elevator ride from the Subway platform to the AirTrain platform. "Praise Jesus! You are the alpha and the omega! Jesus, I lay myself before you! Praise your name! Thank you, Jeses for this elevator! Praise Him! Thank Him for my train! Praise God, for my train!" Then there was the gay couple who we believe were from Montreal. The one without the luggage rain ahead, eyes bulging, like a mouse on crack cocaine. His boyfriend lugging the suitcase tried to get him to stop without making a scene. "Gaston!" he whispered. "Gaston! Gaston!!"

After we landed, we spent a lovely afternoon with our hostesses, Jami and Emmy, who had a little belated birthday cake action for Alex. We heard all about L.A. and why we should move here, and then had lunch with Little Ethiopia with a friend of Jami's from undergrad, her sister and her daughter.

The day ended with a small gathering at a celebrity home (which was being house sat - the celebs were not in residence that day). Where we had some delicious artichoke/jalapeno dip and saw some old grad school mates. There was an odd gay couple there, too, who just took a dip in the pool and then walked around shirtless for awhile and then left. We spent the rest of that evening on an outdoor patio with a fire blazing reminiscing about some yesterdays and rearranging some tomorrows.

L.A. Day Two

We started the morning eating Murray's Bagels, which Alex and I brought with us so J and E could have a reminder of one of New York's truly great works.

We then headed off to the Farmer's Market where I had some awesome Bibimbap - good Korean fast food, who knew? Well, I am on vacation. Then we were off to Venice to visit my friend Cat. Cat is one of those people who has been in and out of my life for 12 years now. We've been co-workers, boss and assistant, roommates, artistic collaborators (she shot the photos for my play Picture 24, and friends for quite awhile now. Venice is beautiful. A little far from L.A. proper, but it has so much more character than the rest of the city (as far as I can tell, so far). Plus you can walk around a lot, which to a 14-year NY resident means a lot. While there we collided with an acquaintance of Alex's from Yale while walking the canals, and were stopped in the street by our school mate Matt (who was in the aforementioned Picture 24). I reminded Matt of Cat like this, Matt, do you remember Cat? She took pictures of you shirtless." Matt grinned, blushed, and crossed his arms over his chest consciously and self-consciously.

It was great to see Cat, but I wish she would move back to New York as much as she wishes I would move to L.A. We ended with some delicious Oaxacan with more grad school friends and a couple new friends: Jami's boyfriend and Alice - (you remember? The woman Rolin and I crowned queen of Humana?)

Tra La La La LA...

Just got back from and am in the midst of packing for a little 5-day vacation in Los Angeles. Although I won't be there Sunday and Monday, you really should go see these 10-minute plays. The actors in mine are KICKASS! I can't believe how funny they are.

I don't know how much blogging I'll be able to do on the road (not that I've been the most regular blogger lately - sorry everyone), but I'll do my best.http://www2.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gif

2G Presents TEN

Hey everyone! I've been to two read-throughs of all the plays and they are all, actually, quite fantastic. So please come check 'em out next Monday and Tuesday at The Public!

And to tease you a bit - my play contains a bit of a surprise at the end that is going to make one poor actress hate me for the rest of her life... ;-)

* * * * * * * * * *

SECOND GENERATION
is proud to celebrate its
TENTH ANNIVERSARY SEASON
with a special In The Works staged reading

T E N

brand new ten minute plays by
CARLA CHING * JULIA CHO * ANDREW CHU
MICHAEL GOLAMCO * DAVID HENRY HWANG
MRINALINI KAMATH * CHIORI MIYAGAWA
QUI NGUYEN * A. REY PAMATMAT * SUNG RNO

starring JESSICA JADE ANDRES * MARIKO BARAJAS
RAJESH BOSE * DON CASTRO * EMILY C. CHANG
YUNG-I CHANG * JACKIE CHUNG * WILLIAM JACKSON HARPER
SUE JEAN KIM * MICHELLE KRUSIEC * KEN LEUNG * ALLISON MUI
MAY NAZARENO * MATTHEW G. PARK * CONSTANCE PARNG
TANIYA SEN * JAMES SEOL * SHANTI WESLEY

produced and directed by LLOYD SUH
associate directors MICHAEL LEW and REHANA MIRZA

at THE PUBLIC THEATER
425 Lafayette Street, New York, NY

MONDAY, APRIL 30 and
TUESDAY, MAY 1, 2007
TWO NIGHTS ONLY
7:00 PM SHARP
FREE ADMISSION

Reservations will be available online at
www.2g.org
starting at 12:00 noon on Friday, April 20th.

THIS IS NOT A NYSF/PUBLIC THEATER PRODUCTION
This program is supported, in part, by public funds from
the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs,
and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council
Second Generation - P.O. Box 231402 - New York, NY 10023
212.344.4777 - info@2g.org
www.2g.org

Someone's in the Kitchen I Know

For whatever reason I listened to the They Might Be Giants song "Where Your Eyes Don't Go" five times this morning. I just kept hitting the back button on my iPod shuffle. It's not that the song was new to me or anything, but I just kept wanting to hear this lyric:

Where your eyes don't go a filthy scarecrow waves his broomstick arms
and makes a parody of each unconscious thing you do

Love those guys.

I never really watched the show, but I do love this song. So here's a little TMBG video for y'all. Enjoy!

Really?!

Okay, so I love Bjork, but...

...is this what you want to put on your next album, Ms. Guðmundsdóttir-Barney? Really?!

REALLY?!

Some Structure

Also in regard to the Turing play.

I was thinking that it might be hard for an audience to pick up in just a few minutes on Turing's ideas while still keeping the story going. I'm thinking now of having these transition type scenes in between the imagined conversations where the ideas are theatricalized. That will also allow me to play with more plastic/physical metaphors and connections between his life and his work instead of just dealing with these issues in the realm of ideas and dialogue. It will also isolate the more heady bits of exposition into concentrated chunks, leaving me space for life event-related exposition peppered throughout the imagined conversation scenes.

I sort of imagine it as a Turing machine, with the audience as the scanner and the transition scenes telling the audience the state of mind in which to shift before the next symbol is printed on the tape. Then when the play is done and all symbols (scenes) have been printed (played), you'll be able to see the complete computation...

I'm a nerd.

Pure Mathematics

noun
the branches of mathematics that study and develop the principles of mathematics for their own sake rather than for their immediate usefulness

I think I may title the Turing play Pure.

I know, I know, I'm still finishing up my research and haven't written a word beyond journal and blog entries, but I often find that a title (even if it just ends up being a working title) helps me keep all the threads of a play tied together.

I Have No Idea What This Means

But it sure does make me happy, so here it is...

Which David Lynch movie are you?

you are: twin peaks
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Where's Your Head At?

To give you an idea of where mine is, my age (31) in binary is: 11111. The numbers composing my birthday are...

Month: 11
Day: 10100
Year: 11110111000

If you express my birth date as a continuous string of digits (3201976, e.g. as the denary number 3,201,976): 1100001101101110111000

Okay, I admit, I used the Google calculator for that last one.

I've also been thinking about the political implications of the Turing play. I'm a little peeved, honestly, to be writing a play with only white people, but Turing was such a sequestered person - first by personality, then by an obscure field of scholarship, finally by a top secret occupation - that any characters of color would be forced. I have been thinking about insisting that casting be color-blind, but I'm not sure how that all fits in yet.

Another political angle - gay people and war. In Hodges' biography of Turing he points out that the Nazis adamantly held that regardless of special talent, no homosexuals would contribute to the war effort or the society of the Reich. The only place for queers post-Röhm was in the concentration camps. Had the Allies done the same (or rather had they done the same during the war rather than after it), there would have been no Turing cryptanalysis to win the war against the U-Boats. The Allies were able to obtain accurate intelligence through the theoretical work of a gay scholar that helped win a war against the might is right regime of a fanatical nationalist of limited education.

I think that it is fascinating then that under the leadership of our own fanatical nationalist of limited education, we're having the exact same troubles, albeit in different configurations. What are the two major problems keeping the U.S. from winning the War in Iraq? Recruitment and intelligence. What are the two major issues for gay men and women in the military? You can't sign up if you're openly gay and the government discharged most of the Army's Arabic linguists (the people who translate intercepted enemy transmissions) because they were gay.

As many of you know, I think this war is entirely unjustified, but nonetheless here's my advice for the President: hire the gays, win the war. Plain and simple.

Touring Turing

Okay - so I've been so busy getting all of my Alan Turing research together that I haven't been blogging. Sorry.

Here's what I got...

Books: I'm about halfway through re-reading the ultimate Turing biography Alan Turing: The Enigma by Andrew Hodges. I'm about one-quarter of the way through re-reading The Man Who Knew Too Much: Alan Turing and the Invention of the Computer by David Leavitt. I got a copy of the play Back to Methuselah by George Bernard Shaw, which Turing saw as a young 'un and which may have influenced if not scientifically then at least creatively and expressively. I have The Essential Turing edited by B. Jack Copeland in which I've read "On Computable Numbers" - though, not being a mathematician, I think I'm going to have to re-read it a few times. Plus, I need to read "Intelligent Machinery," "Computing Machinery and Intelligence," and "Can Digital Computers Think?" I would like to read "Chess" as well. I don't think at the moment I'm going to re-read the plays (Breaking the Code by Hugh Whitemore and A Most Secret War by Kevin Patterson), I got what I needed from them.

WHEW!

Travel: I'm going to London from May 9 (May 10, really - I'm on a redeye) to May 15. I found a cheap (for London) hotel in Paddington - an actual hotel, not a hostel! I'm planning on one, possibly two days in Bletchley and at least a half-day in Cambridge. I mostly want to try and track down significant places in King's college and photograph them. I think there's enough in the online Turing archive for my purposes - I mean I'm not writing another biography, I'm writing a play of imagined conversations. While I want the ideas to be attributable to him in reality, there's only the pretense of reality in terms of situations. That leaves me two days for writing while still in London, which I think will be good for me creatively.

I'm also trying to construct an e-mail to the aforementioned Andrew Hodges to see if he'll meet with me. The thing is, I don't want to sound like a crazy person, and I don't know to what degree my shyness will prevent me from having a very productive meeting.

A Side Note on Strike-Slip and the 2007 Ten-Minute Plays

So Carlos Murillo and I are e-mailing at the moment, and I'll have more on that either later today or early tomorrow. But something that came up during the exchange was the dismissive way in which I wrote about these two presentations at this year's Humana Festival in my earlier post.

Everyone from my boyfriend to the Literary Manager of ATL to Ms. Heather Lea Anderson knows that Strike-Slip was THE play I was waiting for this year, because I love Naomi Iizuka’s work (though, I still have not met her). In fact, Heather probably knows this best since she's the one who had to suffer through my squeals of joy in front of the Public when I found out she was cast in the Huntington production of 36 Views and then even more squeals on 8th Avenue when I heard about the Humana gig. But, personally, I didn’t respond to Ms. Iizuka's piece as much as I’ve responded to Aloha, Say All the Pretty Girls and Polaroid Stories. So if my words in that previous post were interpreted as dismissive of Ms. Iizuka herself, please know that was not my intent. They were very specifically about whether Strike-Slip in particular "added up into something greater for me..."

As for my “eugh” and “eh” reactions to the ten-minutes, neither one was about the plays themselves; I thought they were (especially Clarisse and Larmon) directorially mishandled. I mean as a little queer in Steve Drukman’s and Holly Hughes’ Gay and Lesbian Theatre Class at NYU we actually studied Deb Margolin, and I don’t think for a second I have anything worth offering to a founder of Split Britches.

A little context would have been very helpful here, and I apologize for not being sensitive enough to provide that context. As will become evident in the posts to come, I have very different ideas about the audience for my blog than Mr. Murillo or others might have. So I want to put these words out there in case my ideas about that audience and with what import they read play rey play are, in fact, erroneous.

Thunder Above, Deeps Below

I don't know if I ever mentioned it, but that's the title I'm going with finally for the play formerly known as Undulating Movements on the Surface.

It's getting a bit of tweaking and will be included in the Ma-Yi Theatre Company Writer's LabFest 2007. We don't know if that's July or August yet, but I'll definitely keep you posted.

I couldn't find any gay "thunder" references to add a little visual inspiration to this post, but here's a frame of the gay Avenger Living Lightning from Marvel Comics to give you a little chuckle.

Back-to-Back-to-Back

I watched three episodes of Twin Peaks last night.

The DVDs are amazing. The sound is so great compared to my old LDs, and what's more the show is red RED RED! For those not in the know, when the show aired the color was amped up so that it appeared very, very red. When the show was put on laser disc (and I think the VHS tapes suffer the same problem, too), uninformed folks corrected the color to a more realistic palette. I can't wait to see the Red Room scenes in all their glory. And the shadows are so much richer (moving from blues to purple) that the noir-in-color experience is clearer.

I want to go home and watch three more.

Hum-uh-nuh, hum-uh-nuh HUMANA!

Humana 2007, baby. Oh, yeah.

These are in order of my viewing them.

When Something Wonderful Ends by Sherry Kramer

I had the good fortune to see the playwright read her play, due to the bad fortune of a death in the performer's family. And since this one-person play is pretty much autobiographical, it was truly a treat.

I really liked this one. The play basically worked like this: "Here's what I was doing in 1964 with my Barbie dolls; here's what the United States was doing while trying to secure access to Mideast oil." It was really effective in showing how we Americans are perfectly willing to turn a blind eye to our governments activities overseas (which explains why people aren't exactly disingenuous when they scream, "Why do they hate us?") as long as we can keep on having our All-American, middle class life.

I only wish that the two ongoing narratives would dove tail into each other a bit more easily, but I heard she was still tinkering so maybe that will be solved by the time the play gets to Philly (it was a co-production with InterACT Theatre Company). A little history of Iran, a little "this is how big oil is screwing you," a little history of Barbie and her now infamous proportions - what more could you want from an evening of theatre? Yes, I know - hot, gay sex, but believe me, the show was good even lacking hot, gay sex.

365 Plays/365 Days by Suzan-Lori Parks

This was not actually the week's plays, but a selection from November - April.

Frankly, I've seen more than 100 of these, so I had already seen 4 of the ones they showed. Plus, I'd been panelled to death on 365. So I really don't have too much to say here except: 1) this project is amazing, 2) if you live in NYC or another of the festival cities, go see a week's or a month's worth, and 3) my favorite one so far is the one with the butcher's daughter. Although I liked it better when it was done here in NYC with Peter Gerety and Sue Jean Kim - it was alternately hilarious and heart-breaking.

The Unseen by Craig Wright

I saw this as a history of religion allegory: pagan monument-building/sign-reading, Christianity, the Passion/Crucifixion, the Death of God (Nietschze-style), and then brave new world. I spoke to the dramaturg following the performance and she said it was actually about the man of reason vs. the man of faith being held captive by the secular humanist. Still, close enough, I'd say.

I wish that the first 20-minutes hadn't been so rhetorical. There was almost nothing to grab onto. I also think that if you're going to do the whole history of religion thing (or reason vs. faith thing) that you either veil it more, or just strip it bare. It seemed like The Unseen was afraid of committing too much stylistically.

Batch: An American Bachelor/ette Party Spectacle by Whit MacLaughlin, Alice Tuan and New Paradise Laboratories

OMG - I can't even process how totally AWESOME this was. When they say spectacle, they mean SPECTACLE!!!

I don't even know how to talk about it except to say that I love how the video was truly a seamless part of the performance, I love the equation of these celebratory rites of passage with competitive boxing, I love the physicality, the characters, the Myclops, the under stage space, the EVERYTHING.

I know it's supposed to play other places (not sure where) but go see it. Batch rocks!

The Open Road Anthology by Constance Congdon, Kia Corthron, Michael John Garces, Rolin Jones, A. Rey Pamatmat, and Kathryn Walat

Okay, I wrote two of these pieces, so of course I liked it. More than that, though, I was blessed with awesome and committed performers and a director who knocked it out of the park. For twelve short plays + some songs, it really did seem like one cohesive piece - which is the challenge of the whole Anthology thing, I'd say.

I would like to mention my favorite moment in the whole thing: at the end of Quagmire Choir by Kia Corthron when all the people are singing. That's some theatre folks, some kick ass theater.

Strike-Slip by Naomi Iizuka

Not good, not bad. Not quite sure what I was supposed to come away with. The performances were awesome, the staging was beautiful, and the individual scenes were pretty good. But none of it added up into something greater for me, so I was left wanting.

I like Ms. Iizuka's Aloha, Say the Pretty Girls more.

dark play, or stories for boys by Carlos Murillo

Don't you love when straight men invent all new ways of portraying gay/bi sexuality as twisted and evil? I know I do.

This play pissed me off.

It's totally homophobic. Hands down, homophobia in action - and truly insane homophobia. Queerness as a mind twisting, corrupting sickness; male penetration as murder; gay/bi men as self-hating psychos - dark play really took the cake, shat on it, and shoved it down a skinny, wimpy faggots throat. Moreover, the main character offered a non-stop commentary on his actions so the audience was never left to mull it over and figure it out on their own. Way too easy-peasy and disgustingly hateful.

I don't usually do this, but I'm going to because fuck it: this play was totally gay-baiting and gay-hating so I feel I can respond to it any way I want. The things that everyone is latching on to with this play - online identity, manipulation, and why do people do the things they do? - were done one hundred times better (and without the hate) in The Dying Gaul by Craig Lucas. The play has actual scenes instead of monologues of explanation, the acts of the three main characters are clearer and more horrifying, and the play transcends the "issues" within it and hits you with a, "can you pity your enemy even as you destroy them?" thing that just knocks your socks off.

Ten-Minute Plays: I Am Not Batman by Marco Ramirez, Clarisse and Larmon by Deb Margolin, Mr. and Mrs. by Julie Marie Myatt

Batman - YAY! Clarisse and Larmon - eugh... Mr. and Mrs. Eh.

And that's all I gotta say about that.

The As If Body Loop by Ken Weitzman

This is one of those plays that suffers from a fair amount of over-explaination. There's kind of a strange, mystical thing going on, but everything about it is just laid out for the audience, so it ends up not being mystical at all.

It's not a bad story or anything - it's just that with all the talking about what was happening, I knew what was coming before it occurred. You know what I'm saying? For me, the verdict is still out on Mr. Weitzman. I'll have to see what comes next.


* * * * *

Otherwise, the Festival was loads and loads of fun, fun, fun. It was awesome hanging out with people, seeing all those plays, eating lots of delicious food, and crowning Alice Tuan the Queen of Humana 2007 (in a totally unofficial ceremony presided over by hizzoner the inestimable Rolin Jones). I hope I have the opportunity to do something like this again, because - homophobic plays notwithstanding - I had a really great time.

"Diane, I'm holding in my hand a small box of chocolate bunnies..."

No, I'm not.

I'M HOLDING A SMALL BOX OF SEASON 2 TWIN PEAKS EPISODES.

AHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!

I still can't quite believe it. I don't think I will truly believe it until I've sat down and watched every episode, start to finish.

Better get crackin'.

ACES!