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.)

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.

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

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.

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.

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.)

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.