Sound Cues Appear, As Does the Lighting Designer

We had a run-through tonight for the benefit of Jimmy the lighting designer.  As we're missing Adi and Nate, it was a little bit crippled, but we persevered.  (Becca stood in for Adi; I stood in for Nate.  Sadly, we did not get the chance to show off our interpretations of their speeches.  How disappointing!  Back to hiding our acting-lights under the dramaturgy- and playwriting-bushels.)  The sound cues of the BBC made their exciting appearance; Dina and Nate have lent their voices, and Lucy her recording experience, to the creation of authentic-sounding news-clips-that-never-were.  (The texts of these are assembled from a large collection of actual news clips and news articles, which took about five days straight to read, watch, listen to, and sift.  Research is a barrel of laughs!  Like monkeys, I tell you!)

Jimmy sat at the edge of the playing space, examining actor-placement and stage-layout and writing on large sheets of paper with the name of the play at the top, which look very technical but which I don't understand the nature of at all.  Afterward, we sat down, and he pronounced upon such subjects as When There Will Be Blackouts and What We Will Do About Footlights.  Fun fact: did you know that lighting boards are the only pieces of technology in the entire universe that are still manufactured with floppy drives?  And only floppy drives.  Lighting board manufacturers are evidently sure that the world will soon see the logic of returning to a storage method with data capacities measured in kb.  Which doesn't fit in your pocket.  And is vulnerable to magnets, dust, and very hot days.

Jew to Jew

Sorry, folks, just a little something I have to get out of the way.  A little bit of intra-faith business.

Confidential to the Anti-Defamation League:

You are making us look bad.  I know you do good work; I know there are times (many!) when Mel Gibson needs to be told what's what, and I know (and appreciate!) that you have spoken out against anti-Muslim sentiment in the past.  So now is not the time to quit and start mealy-mouthing it.  There is a tradition of Jewish social justice, and I'm proud of it.  Don't let us down.

And while we're having this chat, can you please quit equating criticism of Israel with antisemitism?  If you argue that (Israel = Jews) then, by the commutative property, you imply that, in any sentence, the words "Israel" can be safely replaced by "Jews."  And considering that there are sentences out there, depressingly true in their original form, that say things like "Israel tortures prisoners," I would really prefer that that substitution didn't take place.

Thanks, guys.  I'm glad we had this little talk.

Publicity Efforts

Or, In Which I Am a Glorified Litterbug.

So we have about 40 pounds of postcards left.  FringeCentral will dispose of some of them for us; some of them will go out in the mail.  But what to do with the rest?  Where can I leave these where they may be found by people who’d like our show?  I find myself on Christopher Street, chin in hand, pondering.

Solution #1: Beside the stacks of copies of The Onion.  People who can detect sarcasm and irony will surely enjoy our play!  (Or at least, enjoy it a good deal more than people who can't.)

Solution #2: On the shelf next to copies of Joe Sacco’s Footnotes in Gaza.  Please don’t tell the people at the bookstore I did that.

Solution #3:  In the hands of the startled Haredi guy I pass on the street.  We’re asking for trouble by our very existence; why not ask for a little more?

Solution #4: On the counter of the vintage store which seduces me inside with a sale on books.  The clerk is too stoned to notice.  (And almost too stoned to remember to actually charge me for the book I inevitably buy.)

Solution #5: ...please email/comment if you have solution #5.  This is a very large number of postcards.

Everyone Loves a Puppet

Adi got to use a real puppet today, instead of a sock or an oven mitt.  He rapidly developed a close relationship.

Now everybody wants to play with the puppet.  Puppets, as it turns out, are completely irresistible.

If this puppet does go on to become Fadl, it will need to lose its pigtails and long eyelashes.  As gender-reassignment surgery goes, that's on the cheap-and-easy side.

The "Sing-Along" Part

And today we sing the songs!  Those songs, so perky, so catchy, so completely impossible to sing in public!  I have training in writing “proper” formal lyrics -- the AABA song, the ballad, the verse-chorus -- thanks to Deborah Brevoort and Gary Gardner, both of whom I trust will not show up to see how completely I’ve disregarded their wise instructions.  We haven’t got time to launch into full songs, so I pack all the gleeful, wild lunacy I can into long single verses.  Unfortunately for you, the listening audience, that is plenty long enough to get songs about war, suicide bombing, and the glory of Hamas stuck in your head.

(Am I bragging?  Maybe a little.  But Lucy co-wrote the melodies, so I’m only half-bragging.)

Below, a picture of the dancing.  I can take no credit for the dancing, but I can assure you that it is very amusing.

Full Run

We ran the whole play tonight!  Much to everybody’s relief, we discovered that it is not, in fact, an incoherent disaster when it’s strung together in the right order.  In fact, you might say it was great.

Tonight the part of Fadil the puppet was played by a blue oven mitt.  Adi’s puppet-voice alters depending on what he’s using, and the blue of the oven mitt brought out a touch of Grover.  You remember Grover, don’t you, boys and girls?  Fadil is extremely cute.

Nate’s bad Arabic was great tonight (though Lucy reminds him to go faster).  The problem we face with the play is: Quentin (Nate) and Hassan (Adi) speak Arabic in the play, but since the audience has to be able to understand it, it’s “translated” into English.  Hassan’s Arabic is represented by a fairly idiomatic English with direct translations of some frequently-occurring Arabic phrases.  (“God willing” for “Inshaallah,” for example.)  But, if they’re speaking English, how can we let the audience see how bad Quentin’s Arabic is?  My solution as a playwright was to write his lines in bad English.  “Bad English” comes in a lot of flavors, depending on what a person’s native language is.  In my experience, for example, English tenses are often difficult for Chinese speakers.  But Arabic tenses are simple, and an American would probably have more trouble with plurals than with tenses; unfortunately, as Becca points out, messing up English plurals makes Quentin sound like a moron.  So we try to strike a balance -- Quentin, when he speaks Arabic, has a small vocabulary and a stilted way of talking.  When he shifts back into English, he’s very colloquial, and says things like “I’m probably just, like, stuck in my undergrad slang.”  Nate helps the effect by pausing to search for “Arabic” words, and speaking fluently in “real” English.

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The Managers Are Here!

Thank God.  I’m quite useless as a stage manager -- I had half a quarter on the subject of stage management, and that was when I was a freshman.  Chrissy and Jing are a blessing -- they help with chairs; they take notes; they stay on book; they make contact sheets and prop lists and charts of who is in which scene; they are generally amazing.

We’re running Act 1 tonight.  We face our first and original problem: how to distinguish the news anchor and the two spokesmen, played by Nate, Matt, and Adi, from Quentin, Jakob, and Hassan, played by Nate, Matt, and Adi?  On the one hand it seems obvious -- Quentin is a 24-year-old just out of grad school, not a news anchor; Jakob, is an unemployed linguist, not a network spokesman; Hassan is a puppeteer, not an emissary from a conservative think-tank.  But we see the anchor and the spokesmen first, and, as our parents always told us, first impressions count.  We’ve settled the question by seating them initially with their backs to the audience, and distorting their voices.  Matt does a fine vocal impression of a Kentucky academic; Nate says he is impersonating Tucker Carlson.  Adi hesitates, then produces a pompous bellow.  “It’s my funny-news-guy voice.”

Children of Gaza

Today Nate sent a documentary around to the cast and team, about the lives of four children in Gaza after Cast Lead, thereby ruining our collective day and/or ability to sleep.  Thanks a bunch, Nate.  No, really, thank you: it’s a fantastic, if horrifying, glimpse of the ugly daily realities of life under siege, picking up, chronologically, where our play leaves off.

The documentary's official site.

Part 1 of 5 of Children of Gaza on YouTube for those of us outside the UK.

Praying

I give Matt a lot of grief because he’s Irish.  Okay, it’s not actually because he’s Irish so much as it is that he’s not Jewish, but he’s portraying an Israeli character.  I try to explain to him how to sound Yiddishe without actually giving him line readings, or sounding like I’m giving him line readings.  This is tricky for both of us, and some times I just want to call up some family or friends and put them on the line with Matt so he can hear what I mean.  I worry about falling into stereotype or parody; a lot of the media presence of these accents and mannerisms is in exaggerated, comic forms, like Jon Stewart's shoulder-shrugged rendition, or Woody Allen's self-consciously Other shpiel.  And I'm not Israeli myself, of course, nor do I come from a household where anybody of any generation speaks more than a few words of Yiddish.  But Matt is an enterprising actor, and takes advantage of the awkward crumbs I can give him to build a more natural character.  He makes a very sweet Jewish dad to his young (entirely offstage) daughter.

Today we’re praying, in translation from Arabic and Hebrew.  The prayer rug and the prayer shawl are dug out, and the finer points of procedure are discussed.  Since I am a Hebrew-school dropout, and Adi has only a vague idea of how salah is supposed to go, we are lucky to have consultants -- Beth advises Matt, and Nuah-Ozryel Bukhari comes in after work to help Adi.  I’m embarrassed by my ignorance; I’ve done so much research for this play, and yet I have to be reminded that one is supposed to kiss the tallit.  In doing my research for the play, I was and am constantly hurt by the tendency to conflate “Jews” and “Israelis”; talking about “what the Jews have done in Gaza” is as ludicrous as talking about “what the Muslims have done in Afghanistan.”  There is also a painful tendency for Western statements of support for Palestinians to slide into ugly claims about “Jewish-controlled media.”  And I feel personally hurt and alienated by this; I instinctively regard myself as Jewish.  In the context of this play I’ve written, and the hostile attention it may garner, I know that my irreligiousness could subject me to accusations of “inauthenticity.”  I feel sad, but, on the other hand: whatever, man; I’m an artist.  I’ll leave authenticity to the role models.

And also perhaps this blog is not a good venue for me to vent about my relationship to my own religio-ethnic identity and whatnot.

But: speaking of prayers, ours have been answered.  We have a stage manager!  AND an assistant stage manager!  Chrissy and Jing are our new favorite people.  They are here to save us from our own incompetence.