Rachel Lynn Brody's Blog, page 30
March 19, 2012
THEATER REVIEW: "The Beautiful Laugh" at La Mama
Clowning is a respected art with a long history, distinct from other forms of theater. My understanding of clowning comes out of familiarity with more classical European traditions, such as Marcel Marceau and the Commedia Del Arte style captured so excellently in The Corn Exchange's production of Dublin by Lamplight, or the Harlequin story as viewed through the memory of a production I saw at Tivoli, in Cophenhagen, when I was about seven years old. In these forms, it's often the precision of physical movement that distinguishes the skilled from the unskilled performer.
The style of clowning used in That Beautiful Laugh is different. It is a physical kind of comedy, related – particularly in the case of performer Carlton Ward – to circus acts and Coney Island contortionists, but it is also a comedy of noises and expression.
At the top of the show, a narrator (Alan Tudyk of Firefly, Dollhouse, Suburgatory and more) explains that there are multiple kinds of laughs, and lists some – as we wind through the cyclical routines presented by Flan (Tudyk), Ian (Ward) and Darla Waffles Something (Julia Ogilvie), the audience is no doubt meant to experience some of these different kinds of laughs. Whether or not the ultimate laugh – that beautiful laugh – is attained is, I suspect, largely in the hands of the audience on any given night.
March 18, 2012
THEATER REVIEW: The Deepest Play Ever @ the New Ohio Theatre
Boo Killebrew, Chinasa Ogbuagu, TJ Witham & Jordan Barbour. Photo by Colin D. Young.
"I'm going to The Deepest Play Ever," I told my friends on Wednesday, "and yes, that's the actual title." Which wasn't exactly accurate. The full title of the production is "The Deepest Play Ever: The Catharsis of Pathos, The Post-Post-Apocalyptical Allegory of Mother LaMadre And Her Son Golden Calf OR: Zombies Will EAT Your Brain! AN EPIC TRAGIDRAMEDY."
But I make a practice of shortening anything longer than a Fiona Apple album title, so.
Playing at the New Ohio Theatre, this strange, meandering mashup of folklore and pop culture takes place some time after the fifth world war, in a post-apocalyptic landscape. The first in a cycle of 800 plays, as we're told by "Time as Narrator" (Phillip Taratula) – the last thespian, who has organized a batch of ragtag performers somewhere in a junkyard.
This first play is about Mother LaMadre (Chinasa Ogbuagu), a figure whose love of knowledge and books has become her life's work – something she reminds us to remember, and assures us she'll remind us of. We learn of her daughter, the simple but kindhearted KitKat (Boo Killebrew) as well as her son, the favorite child, Golden Calf (Nick Choksi). Playwright (Geoffrey Decas O'Donnell), also performing here as Dalvadore Sali, has drawn inspiration from the works of canonical greats such as Shakespeare, Marlowe, Brecht, Strindberg, Coleridge and Lorca, while infusing the epic words of both these and the Greek tragedeans with the spark and fury of more modern writers – Sarah Kane, Ray Bradbury, Lewis Carroll. Instead of resulting in a derivative script, O'Donnell's remaking of these texts brings an edge of folklore to LaMadre's story.
Although it contains superfluous zombies, the core of this play is in precisely that remaking. O'Donnell equates today's pop culture with its past counterparts, treating the older texts with both irreverence and skill. Although it isn't until late in the game that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead gets a shout-out, the show had long-since drawn comparisons to that production in my mind.
A full-length production that moves quickly and is a pleasure to return to after the intermission, The Deepest Play Ever does turn into a Stoppardian chaos in its final moments, with declarations of Arts triumph over violence seeming strangely disjointed and disconnected from the earlier allegory – but maybe this, too, can be interpreted as a reflection of how the sense of fairy tales and allegories can sometimes seem exactly the opposite.
March 14, 2012
Theater Review: "Eternal Equinox" by Joyce Sachs, 59E59
Playing through March 31st, Eternal Equinox compares politics in relationships both creative and sexual. Vanessa Bell (Hollis McCarthy) and Duncan Grant (Michael Gabriel Goodfriend), two painters from the Bloomsbury groupr, spend the bulk of this full-length play trying to understand and negotiate their relationships with one another – particularly when others become involved.
Initially, it is Bell who is out of sorts, having discovered Grant in bed with a young man at a moment when she needed him most. Bell's loneliness permeates the play, and McCarthy always allows it to lurk in her performance. It vacillates as she and Goodfriend trace through the motions of this twoswome – and once adventurer George Mallory (Christian Pedersen) shows up, as part of a changing constellation of unconventional lovers.
Mallory, good-looking and charming, has arrived to invite Grant (whose temperament bears out his profession) to climb Everest with him – and it's not long before Bell – and the audience – begin to understand a rising sense of panic, the fear of abandonment. We see the terrifying abyss into which Bell stares as she contemplates the thought of Grant attempting such a treacherous climb – or of losing him in other ways. Determining to use Mallory as the model for Grant's new painting, both "Bloomies" are surprised to find that it is ultimately and consistently Bell who lays the foundation for Grant's success.
Watching Bell subsume her own ambitions for Grant's sake is heart-wrenching. So is watching the juxtaposition of her multiple roles. Bell is passionate, supportive, insecure, jealous, and even occasionally manipulative – and watching her balance these traits makes for riveting theater.
The production values are strong, with Leonard Ogden's set design evoking the shabby-chic calmness and calamity of English countryside living. Tracy Christensen's costumes help bolster the 1923 vibe , particularly one of Bell's longer dresses.
Well paced and easy to sit through, this production of Eternal Equinox is also a smart look at history and interpersonal relationships that leaves the viewer with plenty to think about after the performance.
February 28, 2012
Selecting Not To Select Kindle Select
I've been involved with a couple of e-publishing projects in the last month or so, and have been trying to get a good idea of exactly what the costs and benefits to the independent author are when using e-distribution; read on for my thoughts on the matter and details of HOT MESS' release.
A while ago, I posted a copy of my first play, POST, on Amazon. It's been more of a control than anything else – something to get the ball rolling, as it were. I've talked it up occasionally – the most recent school shootings (it's a video link; I wasn't about to link to FOX) have been one such instance, given POST'S subject material and its production, unedited, a few weeks after Columbine back in '99. When I've had a day or two's free promotion and publicized it heavily, I've had a few downloads, but otherwise it hasn't gotten a lot of play.
More recently, on Valentine's Day, my short story Sweetheart was featured in SASSY SINGULARITY.I've had the ability to communicate closely with the book's editor regarding the patterns she's noticed in the anthology's performance. Same pattern. We had a heavy publicity blitz for about 48 hours, including blog posts (not well-interlinked, now that I think about it – a note to self for next time), Facebook posts, Google Plus, Linked In and Twitter threads. There was an early spike in orders, then a slow, steady stream of purchases over the subsequent days since. SASSY SINGULARITY has not yet run a free promotion, and even without doing that it cracked the top 100 paid Kindle books in its category.
As a corollary to the SASSY project, I took Restaurants Are Rated Out of Four Stars: a foodie romance and uploaded it as a $.99 download. Business there has been slow. I'm not surprised: it's available for free on my website. The good news? Traffic to that page of rlbrody.com has been up.
Finally, I've also been able to watch the sales of a fellow author who has a respectable back catalog and who has taken full advantage of Amazon Select's free-day promotion – and her sales have been up since the close of her most recent promotion, so it's possible that Kindle Select is a lucrative choice for some.
Which brings me back to HOT MESS . Which, because I don't think I've mentioned it yet, has the most incredibly beautiful (even on black-and-white Kindle e-ink) illustrations compliments of this talented woman. Her album is called Pre-Apocalyptic Love Song. How can you not go check it out?
Anyway. HOT MESS. The climate change anthology you've all been hearing about for months now.
HOT MESS will be available for Kindle users. But given that we're planning on an Amazon price point of $3.99, and in light of what I've learned from other self-publishers, I don't believe that we are placing ourselves at a disadvantage by making the book available on multiple platforms, bypassing Kindle's Select restrictions.
I'll be sure to keep everybody in the loop as we go forward, but if you can recommend (or warn us away from) any particular platforms – comments are welcome! So far, we're looking at a few possibilities in addition to Kindle – any strong feelings on Smashwords or CreateSpace?
…I actually did mean for this to be a post about the gym. Oh well. Another time.
PS – something is messed up with the paragraph formatting on this. Will fix tomorrow. Booo, hiss.
February 18, 2012
I say "re," you say "search"
Have set up a paper.li for Climate Change, so if you want to see what Twitter is saying about that in advance of Hot Mess's March release, click here.
Read a fascinating paper last night called "Can language restructure cognition? The case for space," which is about how different frames of reference carry through both verbal and non-verbal tasks. It's not a long paper, and once you get through the initial terminology it's very readable. Check it out if you have an interest in these things. It's from 2004, so if there's been more work in that area and anybody wants to pass on a link, that'd be great.
You'll notice I haven't posted any Homework Takeaways recently. This is not because I finished my homework. I still have about half of "The Elegant Universe" to go, plus the extra credit. The science got a little daunting but after last night's success with the above I'm feeling ready to take on the world, so to speak, so I'll probably get back to that shortly.
February 16, 2012
Meeting Mr. Handypants: A New York Moment
I had a real "New York Moment" earlier tonight. I met with a friend to discuss some possible ways to start reaching out to climate change groups about Hot Mess. Got there early, and snagged a table next to an older man who was, shall we say, not clad in the latest Spring fashions. Whatever. It's a public space, it was a table, I'm not bothered. Sat for a while, working on a short story idea, until my friend arrived.
At this point, my friend and I start talking about the calendar of releases I've got slated for the upcoming year, and ways to get news out about both Hot Mess and the as-yet-untitled-webseries I'm working on with this guy, as well as Millennial Ex, currently set to appear as part of a one-act play program on gay marriage and marriage equality in Scotland later this year. We chat, we laugh, we drink our drinks.
And suddenly I see it. Out of the corner of my eye. My friend has her back to the eccentrically-clad man at the next table; she can't see what he's doing. But he's got his hand down the front of his jeans. Which are, for some reason, unzipped.
And he is working at it.
What the hell does one do in a situation like this? Report him to the workers? Point it out to my friend? He's two feet away from us. And quite possibly, it now seems, batshit crazy.
So I kept talking. Like nothing was happening. To my friend. About my projects. While trying to lean as far back in my chair as I possibly can, so I don't have to look straight past her at this potentially batshit crazy masturbating homeless-looking dude in the middle of a densely populated Starbucks.
A few minutes go by and I kind of tune out whatever's going on behind my friend, because honestly, who needs to be tuned into that? It's only when a mother and her daughter, a girl of around nine, walk by that I think, Oh, fuck, and glance back over there – but Mr. Handypants has retrieved his arm from the depths of his waistband (and crotch) and so again, I don't say a word. No point. What could I possibly hope to accomplish?
About a half hour later, he picks up his cane and walks away past us and around the corner. My friend made a comment (I don't remember precisely what she said) and it became appropriate for me to say, "Well, you didn't see what he was doing half an hour ago."
She looks at me. "What?"
"He was totally jerking off. Hand down his pants. Up to his elbow." She stares at me. We discuss. The question of how I managed to keep a straight face through it comes up. I don't know! I mean, he wasn't hurting anybody, exactly, right? And do you really want to engage with a situation like that? I DON'T. Either way, he's gotten up and walked away now, so we carry on with our conversation.
Except about ten minutes later, the guy comes back. Only he doesn't go straight to his table. Instead, he stops at the chair next to ours. But in this weird, looming way. Glaring at us. And at first he talks almost too quietly to hear, but pretty soon we both hear what he's saying:
"You two have been treating this like your own private living room for TWO HOURS. LAUGHING and GIGGLING and TALKING. It's NOT your private living room. It's a PUBLIC SPACE and you should BEHAVE LIKE IT."
He lurched back to his table, sat down, and glared at us. My friend and I stare at one another for a split second before we both start laughing again. This does not sit well with Mr. Handypants, who yells, "What?! This is funny?! You think this is a joke?!"
Apparently that was the limit for my WASPish tact, because I shot back (almost before thinking): "No, what I think is a joke is being told I'm treating this place like my own private living room by the guy who had his hand down his pants five minutes ago."
He looked at me and said, "What did you just say to me?"
And I said, "I don't think I need to repeat it, I'm pretty sure you heard me."
The situation quickly degenerates into him shouting about how my friend and I are treating Starbucks like our private living room, and me and she (she and I?) deciding that we are really pretty much finished with our discussion and it might be a good time to leave the coffee shop. As we ignore him, he decides that we've actually spent the last "two hours" (forty minutes max, seriously, I checked) laughing and talking ABOUT HIM.
Which was so far from the case as to make us both laugh again, which pisses him off, and as he continues to rant I have another babysnap and say, "Sir, I guarantee we were absolutely not talking about you; I think you vastly overestimate the degree to which the rest of the world is paying attention to you."
He shoots back, "No, YOU'RE overestimating the degree to which the rest of the world is paying attention to you!" Um, okay, dude. By this point, my friend and I have our things on, we're ready to go, and I don't bother replying. The last thing I hear as we leave Starbucks?
"JUST BECAUSE I'M AN ASSHOLE DOESN'T MEAN YOU CAN BE AN ASSHOLE!"
Yeah.
That's right.
…I f*cking love this city.
February 15, 2012
Amazon Re-Pub of "Restaurants Are Rated Out Of Four Stars: a foodie romance"
Sare Liz Gordy's anthology Sassy 
Singularity, celebrating the strengths of single women, is doing brisk trade over on Amazon, where it's been moving through the bottom ten of the top 100 in genre fiction anthologies for most of the afternoon. The collection features my short, "Sweetheart," about a robot and a computer virus, as well as work by other writers about what it means to be a single woman in today's world.
In light of this, I've decided to make another piece of fiction available on Amazon. Restaurants Are Rated Out of Four Stars is a short story I wrote in 2008 for an anthology of fat-positive fiction.
If you read the story as posted on my blog (link above), please consider heading to its Amazon page and leaving a review. If you know someone who might enjoy it, either send them a link or
February 12, 2012
THEATER REVIEW: "Samuel & Alasdair" at the New Ohio Theater
Samuel & Alasdair: A Personal History of the Robot War received an extension for its run at the New Ohio Theater, and their artistic director Robert Lyon cites it as their "first bona fide hit" in his program note.
Here are my thoughts on this strange, lovely, nostalgic, shaking production.
The seventy-five minute piece is a story within a story, told from a distance of both time and space. In Russia a trio of pirate radio enthusiasts, intensely nostalgic and dedicated (to an underground revolution, or to a dead way of life?) in their reconstruction of a memory of the past they've lost, retell the story of folk heroes from before the robot war: the boy who, like Cassandra, warned of the comping apocalypse and was ignored, and his brother and the woman they both loved. In the end, as we know from the beginning, the brothers in question were in the midst of a continent now deemed uninhabitable. Their betrayals and their personal interest, and even their love are irrelevant, swallowed by time.
As the Russian team – the Host (Joe Curutte), Dr. Mischa Romanov (Marc Bovino), Anastasia Volinski (Stephanie Wright Thompson) and Alexei "Tumbleweed" Petrovya (Michael Dalto) takes the audience (both their purported audience, and those of us in the theater) through this old, familiar tale, we also become enmeshed in their daily life. What seems at first distant – stories of the olden days – becomes more sharply real as the play progresses, climaxing in a horrific phone call that sent a palpable chill through rows of audience members. But in the end, we understand their isolation – are their odds any better than two boys and a girl who grew up in America's heartland before the robot invasion? How does a person keep living in the face of apocalypse?
The company captures the same unsettling dystopian aesthetic so many find attractive about works like 1984, or Margaret Atwood, or Terminator, both in the visual construction of a strange steampunkish set and in the attire and manner of each of the characters. Set designer Laura Jellinik and director Lila Neugebauer, along with the cast, fuse the look of the piece with its performed physical expression, with the industrial setting of the New Ohio adding to the atmosphere.
For me, the key to decoding a wider meaning for Samuel & Alasdair lies in its title – a personal history of the Robot War. The name of the war could almost be insignificant, aside from the directed energy pulses and thirty-meter-high alien robots bent on blasting humanity out of history. Every war has enemies, every enemy tries to wipe its opponant off the face of the map. Along the way, they destroy people and lives, and shape the world in new ways. Someone always wants to hold on to the past, even as they stare toward an increasingly frightening future. But this is the personal side of that war. This play talks about the side of the war where loves are lost and lives destroyed in an instant. This is what happens when the opposing side has no desire for or impetus toward peace.
Samuel & Alasdair is a substantial meal of a theater piece, for being only 75 minutes long; well worth both the trip to basement of The Archive on Christopher Street, and worth letting haunt the nooks and crannies of your brain for a few days after the metaphorical curtain goes down.
Check out their YouTube trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e0PpnVBpFYQ
February 11, 2012
"Sweetheart" to published in the SASSY SINGULARITY anthology
It's been a busy beginning of the year over here on rlbrody.com, and the pace is only going to get more eventful in the next few months. Next on the docket? My short story "Sweetheart" will be appearing in Sassy Singularity, an anthology being edited by Sare Liz Gordy.
Sassy Singularity hits Amazon on Valentine's Day and is a celebration of the single woman.
"Sweetheart" is about robots, intelligence, humanity and decision-making. But mostly it's about a robot.
Sassy Singularity discusses women's strengths, in arenas that range from bars to blogs to Alaska to (you guessed it) robots!
For more information, check out Sare's blog entry on the topic, and get ready for Download Day on Feb 14th!
January 27, 2012
My 10-Minute Play "Millennial Ex" wins honorable mention from Stone Soup Theater Company, Seattle, WA
"A drunken proposal after the passage of the NYS Marriage Equality act leads to an awkward morning after for one gay couple in New York City."
Millennial Ex has just been awarded an honorable mention by Stone Soup; it was entered in their Double (XX) Fest 2.0. My first award-winning play, POST ("Write To Be Heard," 1999) can be purchased for Amazon Kindle.
If you don't own a Kindle and are interested in purchasing a copy of POST, please sign up on my mailing list to be notified when the play becomes available in other mediums. You'll also then receive new blog entries directly to your mailbox.
