And so we come to an end (for now)

Our FringeNYC run is run; our set is disassembled and our costumes split apart.  The actors have other lines to learn, the managers have other shows to run, the director thinks of other shows, the designers have actual jobs, and the writer shoves a draft of an entirely different play into the dramaturg's hands.  And so this blog comes to at least a temporary end, as AK-47 Sing-Along becomes again a script instead of a production.  Plug in the ghost light, friends; we're going dark.

It's been a pleasure.

Thank you.

One Show Left to Go

We have one show left to go -- Saturday at noon -- do any members of our fairly youthful audience actually get up early enough to go see shows in Soho at noon?  God knows I don't, but then I typically stay up until 4 or 5 in the morning.  But I sincerely hope that other people will be able to make it to the show, because our last two have been really great.  Actors don't work in a void; when they can sense that the audience has no sense of irony, it gets hard for them.  But we've had good audiences, and we hope to have at least one more.  At this point I recommend you buy tickets at the door, but if you want a discount, you can head to 1 8th St, and get one for $15 -- until noon on Friday, that is.  After that, you're stuck with $18 at the door.

What will I do when this is over?  I mean, the day afterwards I will probably spend dead asleep, but what about Monday?  Start writing grants to go to Edinburgh?  (But who says anybody else wants to pick up and go to Scotland for two weeks?)  Or just send out the script to a few far-away places that will produce it, if they do produce it, without me or Lucy or any of the actors to whom the parts now seem so permanently bonded?  Lie in bed and feel lost?  Apply for jobs and internships, as I so desperately need to do?

Some combination of the above.  But most likely I'll sit down and write another play.  Nature did not intend me for a producer.

Pictures!

Check out these awesome photos Nate took!  Because he was dutifully acting as our photographer, he doesn't appear in any of the photos, which is a pity.  But check out these beautiful snapshots:

Nisr and the Young Girl: "Feyn beytik?"

Salwa and Mahir: "For the children of Palestine!"

Hassan: "All greetings, blessings, and good acts are for you, O Lord."

Jakob: "By your light shall we see light."

Wonderful.

We had a good audience tonight -- they laughed and cried, exactly where I would have wanted them to.  

Don't you waggle your ears at me!

So, we were invited by Fringe publicity to bring our "big visuals" to the CBS Early Show for possible interviews and some camera time.  We stood on the line with Devin in his rabbit ears, Mary in her pink hijab, and me toting Fadl the neon green puppet.  The people standing around us found us quite entertaining.  The anchor began to move down the line, talking to people.  He saw us standing there, and took in Mary's headscarf and our muppet-with-an-assault-rifle postcards, and visibly reared back and away from us.  No signs of Islam for the morning show!  We're too busy watching idiots across the nation equate Muslims with terrorists!  But we made it into the background of another shot, holding up our postcards and looking adorable, with Mary carrying Fadl.  Devin, catching sight of himself on the monitor, shook his head, and a P.A. went crazy.  You can't let your ears wiggle on the Early Show!

We've been getting some press.  It's mostly positive, but it makes a lot of mistakes that I'd sort of like to address, and one review walks straight into the issue I mentioned before, of making assumptions about my attitude on the basis of my Jewishness.  But, although I am burning to address the issues of Why Quentin Is Vital to the Play and How This Play Is Really, Really Not Pro-Israel, I guess it's kind of tacky to argue with critics.  We will let their bad writing speak for itself.  (Okay, so it's hard to resist being bitchy when people are insinuating that you're biased towards Israel because you're Jewish.)

Off and running!

We opened Friday night; we had our second show this afternoon at 3:30; we are pretty fabulous; I am completely exhausted.  We have had a very respectable turn-out, especially from the press.  There has been some awkwardness from audiences, in no small part, I think, because gentiles are afraid to laugh, lest we think they are anti-semitic.  But I heard you people sniffling at the end -- don't try to deny it.

Wow.

May we take a moment, please, to admire the mad genius of Beth Goldenberg, our costume designer?  Check.  This.  Out.  And these are the rough drafts!

First, the basic costume, with Beth modestly hidden behind Devin (I think she's pinning something); then, cat ears meet rabbit nose on Devin's furry, furry head.  Don't you want to pet him?  And he sings, too!

Dare I say it, we were looking pretty good in rehearsal today.  I haven't seen some of these scenes from the front in a very long time, and they look great!  Oh, cast, you will make me cry.  You're going to make the audience cry, too.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm off to make some press packets.

(Shout-out of thanks to the Halpert-Zarkys, by the way, who are our angels and send their best from Seattle.)

TECH

Today we had our tech rehearsal, a.k.a. our one chance to rehearse in our performance space before we have to, you know, perform in it.  Because the hour of truth is drawing near, best beloveds; I hope you are resolving at this moment to buy your tickets tonight!  ("Best beloveds" is a writing tic I picked up from reading Rudyard Kipling stories as a child.  Unfortunate connection to British imperialism or part of the whole weird nostalgia theme we have going on around here?  You decide!)

But tech rehearsal went well (our alphabet-and-number tiles are a sight to see, and the costumes Beth provided are fantastic -- Matt looks paternal, Mary looks adorable, the addition of the little woven bracelet to Nate's costume made me howl with laughter at its sheer accuracy) although we were delayed in starting by a police investigation.  Somebody had gone into one of the dressing rooms and made off with some valuables, so the police were in all morning, and questioned the staff, and delayed our tech by half an hour -- which is actually a ridiculously short amount of time, all things considered.

Devin was absent, which was unfortunate for several reasons.  First, obviously, Devin will never have seen the space until 15 min before he performs in it.  Second, I had to stand in for him.  I don't know the dances, don't know the lines, and generally don't know what I'm doing.  Also, I can't sing.  It did give me a chance to hang out backstage with Mary, though, which was nice.  I told her my idea of doing a video promo for the play by having Nate record an in-character video blog.  I think it would give a distorted idea of what the play is about, but it might also be very funny.  Making fun of Quentin combines the ease of shooting fish in a barrel with the fun of a barrel of monkeys.  Shall I shoot the monkeys in the barrel?  Is that a legitimate joke?  Does Nate read this blog?  All questions that may be answered in the future, but will not be tonight.

Venue Prep Day

It is kind of a wonder that I can write this post.  That's because I spent a lot of today dealing with ladders.  I don't like ladders.  They are directly related to heights, which I am afraid of, and they always seem kind of unstable, so I am not just worried that I will fall off them, I am also always worried that other people will fall off them as well.  Which is why the less-stressful bit of ladder-oriented work was holding the ladder for Becca, who knows what she's doing and is not afraid of heights.  Becca doesn't become a trembling wreck because somebody asked her to tie a curtain to the grid.  I do, but I did it anyway, which, I mean, good for me and all, but being a trembling wreck is kind of exhausting.  Especially when somebody asks you to get up on a ladder in the dark to adjust something which isn't necessarily the safest way of accomplishing the particular task it is accomplishing.  But, here I am to tell the tale.  The boring, boring tale.

In other, very much related news, lighting and scenic design progress apace!  Brett tells amusing stories about the reactions of Toys-R-Us clerks who are confronted with a young man buying 216 square feet of alphabet-patterned foam puzzle pieces.  Jimmy finds 1000W lights and does interesting things with them that I probably shouldn't give away.

All the other shows who share our venue were also present today, of course, and so there was a postcard exchange.  And everybody looked at ours and said something along the lines of, "OH, it's the one with the MUPPET with a GUN."  To my perpetual surprise, everyone seems to have heard of us.  Stop putting off buying tickets, readers.  The link is to the right.

(Alternately, you can go to 1 W. 8th St, and buy them for $15.  Grab a postcard while you're at it.)

In other, slightly less officially related news: once you have written one perky song, it can become hard to stop.  I find myself taking all kinds of flimsy excuses to do it.  Right now I do it socially, but the next thing you know I'll be staying in at nights to do it alone.

OH WAIT.

Well, so I guess the existence of this play is proof that it's clearly trouble, this ditty-writing business.  But the latest is actually social in origin; it's for Becca, who doesn't like asking other people for help.  Even if a friend might be useful in the matter of, say, dislodging 216 square feet of foam puzzle pieces from their awkward hiding place in an electrics closet.

Friends are useful!  Friends are fun!

Friends can help you get things done!

You may be very strong and

You may be very smart

But friends are there to help you out

So let them do their part!

It goes on from there.  If you could hear the melody, you'd hate me right now.  Fortunately for both of us, I don't go in for singing to YouTube.

More Postcard Disposal

So, for want of time, I discussed exactly nothing at the panel tonight.  I did give a brief summary of our play, in between the summary from the guy whose all-under-24 group had restructured Richard III into a musical built around teen angst, and a guy who's doing a dance piece based on the work of the Beats.  Mary, Matt, and Nate did give excellent, and extremely snappy, performances.  Like lighting bolts!  Audience never knew what hit 'em.  Though they must have had some idea, because people asked for postcards afterwards.

Speaking of: more postcard-distribution solutions were found today!  Picking up where we left off:

Solution #5: Steal a bunch of copies of the Village Voice from the bin.  Insert a postcard in each one, facing the positive review of Lebanon.  Return papers to bin.  That's targeted marketing, right?

Solution #6: Wedge postcards into the frames of large liquor ads.  We don't mind if you're drunk at the show, so long as you don't distract the actors.  Or publish a review of the play afterwards.

Solution #7: Drop postcards into the baskets of parked bicycles.  Certain types of baskets just scream "some disposable income!" and we're an excellent way to spend disposable income.

Solution #8: Duck into a Starbucks to get an Arnold Palmer after two hours of wandering around south of 14th St. in 90-degree weather sticking postcards in weird places.  Place diminished stack of postcards on counter while rifling around for cash.  Hear the magic words: "Is that a muppet with a gun?"  Give postcards to baristas, who take notes on where to buy tickets.  Consume Arnold Palmer and exit.

Materials for the Arts

Today was our appointment with Materials for the Arts.  MFA, for those of you following along at home, is a lovely service which connects discarded industrial goods with needy non-profit artists -- like us! -- for free.  It is also a giant, infuriating bureaucracy in a well-hidden warehouse in Long Island City.  It's hot; it's grubby; it makes me unspeakably cranky.  All the frustration of thrift-store shopping with a thousand times the chance of sticking your hand on some weird fiberglass by-product that will make your hands sting for days!  And you can't say no to anything, because what if you regret it later?  And it's all free!  So I sit by the cart and glower.  I am a top-flight glower-artist.

But the real horror of MFA, legendary among visitors, is the parking guy.  The parking guy is an example of the failure of the conventional playwright's tools.  Merely reporting this guy's speech won't cut it when it comes to conveying exactly how infuriating he is.  He is in a constant state of wounded anger.  He cannot believe that you would drive into the parking lot without stopping at the unmarked, ambiguous border to hunt him up from wherever he is!  He is enraged by your failure to follow rules you had no way of knowing about!  He is sneeringly contemptuous of your ignorance of where the door is!  For all of these sins, he will subject you to a repetitive, half-shouted, half-whined lecture, which can only be escaped by (a) flight, or (b) the appearance of some other poor soul breaking rules nobody told them.

But anyway, now we have lots of stuff.  My favorite is the tambourine that looks like a turtle.

Events Upon the Near Horizon

I'm going to be on a panel at the Brecht Forum on Friday night, talking with other people whose plays have political themes.  There will also hopefully be a short excerpt from the play (under 10 minutes), in the form of scenes and monologues from Mary, Matt, and Nate.  I may humiliate myself; they will certainly not.

FringeNYC at the Forum
451 West St (between Bank & Bethune)
7:30 PM

A History of Violence

"She ought to be slapped for writing it."

I had the pleasure once of hearing my play discussed by people who didn't know I'd written it.  Invisibility is a privilege of playwrights; actors are seen by the public, while we hide in the shadows.  Interestingly, the reaction (summarized in the statement above) was not the one that haunted my nightmares.  (I have a reoccurring dream of being condemned by the rabbi during Yom Kippur services.  I barely even go to services.)  The speaker felt that the play was anti-Palestinian; I'm not sure if she'd stayed for the second act or not.  I loitered in the hall where she was talking to her friend, trying to look casual.  I awaited my moment.  When the conversation seemed to be turning away from AK-47, I approached.

"I couldn't help but overhear you talking about that play*... I wrote it, and I was just wondering if there was anything you wanted to ask me about?"

Oh dear.  Much back-pedaling.  Much equivocating.  Many, many chances, all of which I took, for me to show off all the research I had done, all the care I had taken.  Some implicit apologies.  Some satisfaction.

I narrated this incident to my father later.  "Well," he said, "you're provoking everybody, kid!  Isn't that what art's supposed to do?"  I hear this a lot, and I suppose to a certain degree it's true, but it also seems worrying likely like a commonplace.  Is it my job to provoke?  Or is my play insufficiently clear, that someone could see it and come away with the idea that I was condemning Gazans and excusing Israel?  Artistically, I prefer to err on the side of obscurity rather than heavy-handedness, but the entrance of politics does complicate things.  I don't like to think of my play as being itself propagandistic, but if it can be read in the way that my critic in the hall read it, then it takes on some aspects of that genre, a notion with which I am not comfortable.

* A dirty lie.  I could totally have helped it.

Disclaimers

So, like every good Child of the New Media, I have, of course, used Facebook to advertise our show.  And, like every good Facebook user, I am friends with people I haven't spoken to in years, and people I met casually at a party one time, and probably people who have mistaken me for somebody else of the same name.  My nose being to the publicity grindstone, I invite all these people to come see the show.  Since I am a hardened insomniac, I check back in at 4AM to see who's planning to show up.  I see that Mary and Matt are planning to come; that's good, because we don't have understudies.

I see that two people have already definitively decided that they're not coming.  I know who they are; I don't know them that well.

I can already hear Becca tactfully suggesting that I am perhaps a little paranoid, yes?  And  I am decidedly paranoid.  But I, looking at their (Arabic) names make anxious (probably incorrect) guesses about what they, looking at my name, may (incorrectly) guess about my play.  Such as: since it is written by this playwright with the Hebrew given name and the German-Jewish surname, it must be a defense of Israel.  It concerns "Tomorrow's Pioneers", so it is about how Palestinians are anti-semitic.

But obviously it is no more fair for me to assume that these are their reasons for not coming than it would be for them to make those assumptions about my play.  Nevertheless, I'm filled with a pathetic desire to take every opportunity I can to assert or suggest my actual values.  I won't fall so far as to begin writing "Not anti-Palestinian!" on the postcards I hand out, because once you start going there you might as well break out the fine-tipped pen and write a little essay about how your play is about different ways of conceptualizing/narrativizing traumatic events and the concept of home, and the loss of home.  And once you've done that, everybody knows you're not a blind supporter of Israel, and nobody wants to see your play, because it sounds boring as fuck.

And it just seems craven: why should I have to fall all over myself to prove that I'm a moral human being with an independent opinion?  Just because I'm Jewish?  No.  No.  You'll have to trust me, and give me credit, as you should try to trust and credit every writer.  (Or at least, until they have proven themselves unworthy of such credit.)

Theatre Has No MPAA

Tonight an actor from my other show* told me that she'd seen a child on the B train admiringly holding a postcard for our show.  She estimated the child's age at 4 years.

People.

Watch your children, please.

Yes, there's a fuzzy puppet on the postcard.  Yes, the word "Sing-Along" appears in the title.  Did you notice the "AK-47" bit?  This is ironic juxtaposition; it's meant to illustrate the circumstances which the children of Gaza find themselves in; circumstances which your 4-year-old American child should, by the grace of God, never have to endure or even contemplate.

I thought this went without saying, but then again, at my meeting with the Fringe folks, they asked if the show could be sorted into the "FringeJR" category, so evidently it doesn't.  I can't say if we're "PG-13" or "R" or whatever nonsensical category the movies are using these days, but I can say this: DO NOT BRING SMALL CHILDREN.  They will be bored, upset, or possibly psychologically damaged.

*A contemporary adaptation of the Bacchae, much more in my usual sex-and-violence line.  We're about to go out into the parks of New York City and scare the joggers a little bit.  Check us out.

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.

Tickets Tickets Tickets!

Tickets to our fabulous FringeNYC show are now on sale!

Click here to purchase!

Just select the showtime you’d like to attend.  Remember, you’re not allowed to send us hate mail unless you’ve seen the show!  (Please include your ticket number in your angry email for verification purposes.)

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.

Postcards!

Our postcards are here!  They feature the stylin’, stylin’ art of Aron Bothman -- our iconic image of a muppet-ish puppet holding a Kalashnikov.  We got 5,000.  That’s 50 pounds of postcards, for those of you playing along at home.  Want a postcard?  We have postcards.  Click through for the full images.

Working Hard

Nate:
How ‘bout I just improv the rest?

Samara:
Nooooo!

Nate:
Samara, I’d say something about how easy it is to get to you, but that would belittle how hard I work to do it.

Samara:
Well, and of course I put in some effort to exaggerate my degree of gotten-to-ness for comic effect.

Nate:
A full-time job for both of us, then.

Lucy:
Right, so we’re working on this monologue...

Salwa, Meet Nisr (& Majid, & Mahir)

    Devin hasn’t been able to come to any rehearsals until now (damn you, day jobs!) and so Mary has been acting by herself, even though almost all her scenes have Devin in them somewhere.  She asks if today is the day she finally gets to meet her scene partner, and we are pleased to say: yes! 

    Devin, of course, played the role(s) last time, and he remembers his lines well.  Lucy encourages him to enlarge his performance, since our stage is larger this time.  He does a cartwheel.  Then he does a somersault.  A little while later, he walks on his hands.  ACROSS THE WHOLE STAGE.  Devin is a talented man, y’all.

    Earlier today, Adi rehearsed with Matt and Nate.  The three of them also got to see Kristina for the first time this year.  Kristina remembers Nate, but had to be introduced to Adi and Matt.  Lucy was delighted to discover that Adi can lift Kristina up.  I don’t want to spoil our closing image, but I think it’s going to look really good.

    Right now, Lucy is recording Dina’s BBC reports.  She needs quiet, so Becca and I have had to retreat to the lobby of the theater to gossip idly, and also to eat some of the large quantity of delicious, delicious biscotti Becca’s Italian grandmother has pressed on her.  God bless our Old World grandmothers.  If mine were here, I’m sure I’d have an ample supply of super-buttered cookies to pass around, since Grammie Nutza believes that butter is the staff of life.  (Bread just ruins your appetite.)

Showing Off, Showing Space

    I mention to Adi that the name of Hassan’s puppet, Fadil, is spelled in Arabic with a dod (ص), or emphatic D.  Adi, who speaks Arabic much better than I do, rolls his eyes and says, “Oh, you enjoyed telling me that, didn’t you?”  I blush, embarrassed to be caught out showing off, and he reassures me that he’s just giving me a hard time, but he’s right; I am a show-off.  Ah well.  Dammit, people; I did a lot of research!  I can’t put all of it in the play, and it has to go somewhere.  So usually it comes spilling out of my mouth.  In truth, though: I think it’s all fascinating, from the list of items banned from import into Gaza to the relationship of Israel to the life and death of Yiddish, and I naively suppose that everybody wants to hear about it.

    Lucy directs Nate and Adi in a scene where Quentin and Hassan stand together in Hassan’s house.  She tells Nate to expand the borders of the house.  Initially, I find this kind of mysterious; earlier in the scene, we’d indicated that half the stage represented Jakob’s house in Tel Aviv.  But as Nate walks, or rather trots with Quentin’s puppyish enthusiasm, across the space, and Adi, with Hassan’s patience, strolls after him, I see what she means -- it’s like the effect in film where a split-screen slides away to leave a whole picture of a single place.  God, I’m glad they put up with me.

Meet the Folks

I’m going to talk a lot about a lot of people here.  You can check them out, professionally, on the “Cast” or “Team” pages of our website.  Perhaps I will do some sort of “Person of the Day” feature where you can learn interesting stuff about Lucy and Brett and Mary and all of us.  But I’d want their permission for that, I think, so for the moment, I’ll just do myself.

Hi.  I’m Samara.  I’m the playwright. 

I'm a former kindergarten teacher and an obsessive researcher.  I'm also Jewish, which for some reason people make a deal about when you write a play about Gaza.

I’m not actually as facetious as this blog sometimes makes me look.