Stagger Lee Walks Tall in "The Caretaker"

Matthew Carter, Seàn Patrick Judge (a great name for an actor), and Greg Dean are now performing Harold Pinter's The Caretaker in a nigh-abandoned store front in a downtown Houston strip mall, the tatty atmospherics of which meld nicely with the gloom of the decrepit one room living quarters-cum-storage room on stage.  The three Houston actors decided one day to "put on a show," and without director, but with the support of stage manager Abbie Falk, managed to rehearse and produce a very entertaining play:  they make it easy to remember that Harold Pinter is funny.  Greg Dean's Davies physicalizes and vocalizes bewilderment, gratitude, fear, and down-and-outness with invention and guts.  Seàn Patrick Judge's Aston is all wide-eyed creepy innocence.  Matthew Carter's Mick is all narrow-eyed innocent creepiness.  Each of the three manage to wear a different kind of groove into the dusty carpets of the one room their lives entangle in, and they rarely fall into any one rut, or unconsciously mimic one another--their bodies all moving differently, in different tempos and rhythms, and voices finding different thicknesses of cockney or welsh inflected dialects.  The staging is as simple as it can be, but complete.  It doesn't look as if it cost much money, but it's full, not a minor accomplishment for three guys working on a shoe string, and holding down full-time jobs, to boot.

I went to the show both because I trust the actors--having seen Judge work before--and because I and fellow UH MFA '09 grads may well mount one or two shows ourselves, in the coming months.  I wanted inspiration and I got it.  

The first show I was ever paid to act in was similarly put up by several guys, in Portland, Or, who'd been carrying the script of Glengarry Glen Ross around in their back pockets for years, and to this day that show remains one of my favorite performance experiences.  There is no such thing as 'essential' or 'basic' or 'pure' theater (which I recently heard a young actor call such shoestring productions), because almost by definition, theater is extraneous.  It is all ritual and pageantry--all spectacle--down to its roots, unconnected with the daily tasks of survival.  The most 'realistic' or 'naturalistic' theater out there is, at it's heart, spectacular, even if it's on a bare stage (e.g., Shakespeare's plays had little or no scenery, but they did employ extravagant costumes and language.)  BUT, we actors do well to remind ourselves that we don't necessarily need big budgets or props or supporting funds to create satisfying, right-sized, dramatic spectacle.  All we really need is passion, commitment and skill to do so.  Most of the time, I do want real financial and material support from others to make theater, if for no other reason than our capitalist society makes it almost impossible for us to sustain our energies to do excellent work again and again, without it (e.g., we need to hold down day jobs!)  But, some of the time, we should thumb our nose at all that, and pick ourselves up by our own bootstraps.  We refuel ourselves when we do.  Cleanse our palettes.  Get better at our craft.  And delight our equally dedicated audiences.

Go see The Caretaker.  It's cheap, and you'll be entertained.  You may find performance information on Facebook.  Search for "Stagger Lee," and you're there.

Discovering Opera

I'm an opera newbie.  Irene has introduced me to the Met's HD movie presentations and I often struggle to stay awake.  During the first two acts of Turandot, I kept drifting, unable to keep my eyes open.  But, I didn't ever quite fall asleep, so the music washed over me rather weirdly.  What came across more strongly than anything is that the music in Turandot seemed all elegiac to me.  Whereas Tosca was full of conflict, Turandot was more one long ritual.  This made the music sound very even to my ear.


But, even as I was half asleep, Turandot worked on me.  I could feel something very true coming through.  In an interview during an intermission, the conductor said that Puccini "is a dramaturge of the emotions," and I know what that means, now.  Turandot felt like an exploded diagram of the moment in which two young people move from adolescence into adulthood, a moment in which the brittle truths of youth give away to the impossible-to-understand longings of adulthood.  The youthful bulwarks of certainty and knowingness crumble, as the young prince makes his stand, acting on a vision with emotional grab but no justification....  This puts my thoughts very badly, but that's probably because Turandot got to its subject very economically and incisively.  This was the first opera I've seen, so far, in which I felt Shakespearean subtlety.  


I'm beginning to get it.  If Shakespeare is at least 51% intellectual at all times, then opera is 99% emotional.  Turandot drills straight down.

Request to Kindle Developers:

Work on making the 'hand feel' of the Kindle something more akin to a book and less technological and plastic.  Wrapping the thing with an additional leather cover won't do it.  If the thing feels good in the hand and is pleasant to the eye--if it feels like something that belongs in a library--readers will be quicker able to forget that the reading surface is a "screen."  The Kindle screen may not be the same as paper, but it's not like other screens--as you know--and readers need help in making that discovery.  The word "screen" is definitely getting in the way of readers' acceptance.

"The Prisoner" (2009)

Tonight, I'm watching the AMC miniseries remake of the 1968 BBC series original.  So far: ugh.  This version completely misses the Fellini-esque and theatrical atmosphere and humor of the original, which worked because it was funny, in a serious way.  The tongue-in-cheek acting style made the dread more dreadful.  The style and tone of the original could not be separated from the substance.  This remake I'm watching is straight-up realism, with nary a wink to the audience.  This leave us with just the story, which isn't complete--isn't the story the filmmakers seem to think it is--without the self-knowing theatrics.  Boris Karloff and James Whales could have taught these people a thing or two.

I can smell the bacon frying in the pan and it's boring.

Oh, Get Over It: Kindles are Good

I don't understand the animosity toward Kindles.  I thought everyone likes trees.  Maybe we should all read on papyrus scrolls or stone tablets. Two or three generations of e-readers down the road and we'll have a reading experience that perhaps rivals books. Romanticism of the past is almost always a deeply conservative response to change.

I miss illuminated manuscripts too.  But, art books, coffee table books, (and for the moment) books that require lots of thumbing of pages will for a long time be better read and studied in paper form.  I find my Kindle is best for pleasure reading, especially fiction, which I don't dog ear a lot.  It's basically a replacement for paperbacks.  Anything more scholarly is too cumbersome to read on my Kindle, but I look forward to the day when an e-reader is as liberating as a book.  Wouldn't you like to live in a society where people have reading material on them all the time because it's so convenient?  Where they read in airports rather than watch Fox News on giant monitors?  (And where they also enjoy epistolary experiences with a great variety of people, many of them strangers, because communicating by written word is easy and accessible?  And which is why I'm a fan of the blogosphere!)

I'm as nostalgic as the next pedantic literary snob for the smell of yellowing pages. But, I like living trees more.  And I find the animosity to Kindles and e-readers to be unwholesomely elitist.  It's worth remembering that it's only the present generation and soon-to-come generations of e-readers that are expensive.  Five years from now they'll be cheap.  Paperback novels and internal combustion engines will (hopefully) soon be artifacts of the Industrial Revolution.


It's always, always easier to know what we lose rather than imagine what we gain.  That's why it's easier to be a critic than an artist.  Let's be artists.

Why Write A Novel?

One very good reason for writing a novel--I'm discovering?  I can control it.  Auditions?  Collaborative projects?  Forget it, brother.  The universe has its own mojo.

Okay, confession:  I am in the Apple Store typing this on a Macbook Air, which I'm considering buying as a refurbished unit online.  So far?  This is wicked cool.

Currently Working On

• Dangerous Writing:  post production
• rehearsing Speed the Plow, with Jonathan Gonzalez and Jackie Collier
• considering doing  American Buffalo with Leraldo Anzaldua and Adam Van Wagoner
• Research for one-man show 
• Mother, long fiction
• preparing for (long delayed) move to Philadelphia in January, '10

Currently Reading

• Tree of Smoke, by Denis Johnson
• American Buffalo, by David Mamet

National Novel Writing Month : Ah, Damn.

As National Novel Writing Month gallops along I've fallen wheezing off the back of the pack.  No matter.  It's made me start writing.  I'm making discoveries each time I type even a few words, so I'm going to finish way, way later than the end of November, but I'm going to finish.  The bonzai! approach didn't quite work out for me on this one, but it didn't quite fail, either.  I still owe Suzie V. at least a paragraph at the end of each day.  That's something.

One over-arching discovery:  in the past, my attempts at writing fiction were often stymied because I didn't know as many different kinds of people as needed.  Most novels don't thrive on nature descriptions alone, they need to be peopled.  I'm finding that by now, however, I do indeed know many kinds of people.  Finding characters to fuel events is no longer a problem.

Update: DANGEROUS WRITING

DANGEROUS WRITING (the movie) inches toward completion!  Picture is locked.  Original music for the soundtrack is nearly done; a trailer is in the works; end credits will soon be done; color correction will happen anon.  A major reason for my trip to Portland this coming December is to do my part in moving it to completion.

Neal A. Corl has written, directed and co-produced this film as a labor of love and dedication to an inquisitive, highly intelligent, deeply creative mode of filmmaking.  Neal experiments with film form, invites the audience to take chances, and challenges himself, actors, and artistic collaborators to work with clarity and improvisation.  Neal marries a still photographer's eye, novelist's sense of detail, and screenwriter's dramatic instincts.  When and if he subverts narrative expectations, he does it after having slyly invited his audience to collude, simultaneously challenging and seducing his audience, which is quite a trick.  DANGEROUS WRITING is often deeply funny by being deeply sly:  there's a lot going on in its complex mise en scene. You'll see what I mean.

I'm deeply proud of our film's quirky, sometimes enigmatic, beautifully filmed, questing little soul.  And you're going to hate me in it.

I mean that in a good way.