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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.