Fall Omnibus 09

My life in the Circus has been increasingly… in the Circus. The literal circus.

I’ve been dead on the wire since the end of tour and the big HBO shoot. Some updates are in order.

Chicago
Summer in Chicago is one long party. God bless it. I lived with Jeremy, professional pastry chef and actor extraordinaire, in his apartment northside. Spent much of the summer back in the bike shop, where as always, it became clear that even a really great jobby job is a poor substitute. So I leaned heavy into riding my unicycle after work in the alleyways of Chicago (a strong argument for the superiority of the city, those alleys). This for the sum total of forty five seconds on a unicycle that I was to perform in Lookinglass Alice.

Louisville
The same outfit I understudied for two summers ago, I played for more properly this last fall – in Kentucky, at Actor’s Theatre of Louisville. That experience itself deserves a great writeup, but alas, the weeks immediately following prevented it, and it seems gone now, somehow. Teasers include Freddy’s – the dive bar kept in operation almost exclusively as far as I can tell by business from the employees and interns of the Actors Theatre of Louisville. One of those interns was really amazing, and beautiful, and kissed me. In the bar. A man starts to feel like he really is rambling when these sorts of chance encounters happen only in the face of imminent departure. Dracula made a special appearance in Lookingglass Alice (genius), as the two shows overlapped by a couple of weeks. Standing room only in a 700 seat theatre by the end. Hobnobbing with old Louisville bankers and Congressional representatives at a museum/bar, and leisure time in the pool the next morning.

So much for Kentucky.

Albuquerque
The day after we closed Alice in Louisville, hop a flight and begin preparations for my brother’s wedding, in Albuquerque. A real barn-raiser of an event, it seemed like most of the heavy lifting (the factual heavy lifting) got done by my brother, my dad, and myself. The wedding was awesome. I gave a speech, I signed the certificate, I held the rings until they took them, and I held the motherfucking bible when the man said Man and Wife. Holy lord alive.

Two days after that, begin rehearslas for Cymbeline, at Tricklock Company.

Memphis
Three days after that, fly to Memphis for a fire performance – at a bar mitzvah. The party was produced by the kind of friendly guy that can’t stop telling stories about himself, and who kind of gives you the creeps, but you don’t know why. The party was largely populated by confused children – oversexed and overprivileged. But it was out by 9:30, and we two circus performer types (the hotel receptionist knew who we were before we opened our mouths – apparently we had a look about us) had a rented car, two hotel rooms, and nothing to do but spend per diem. Boom. Beal Street. heartbreaking harmonica players, public drunken lover-spats (always totally stacked in her favor), and ridiculous beers. In short – an all expenses paid trip to Memphis, together with an arranged date with a pretty circus girl. (Circus girls. Lord help me.) Coda to the ramblin man comments above.

Albuquerque
Three days after that, back in rehearsals for Cymbeline, moving into an apartment (bizarre) and the flu.

Chicago
A week after that, back to Chicago for a week. The band got back together to do Hunchback again. In what the University of Chicago laughingly calls a Chapel. You or I, or any untrained bystander might call it a gigantic cathedral. The show was easier than expected to put back on its feet, and adapted strangely and beautifully to the radicaly different space. It felt good to damn near sell out a thousand seat cathedral after haing expected maybe 350 people. And it felt good to put back together the most ludicrously, senselessly beautiful and wonderful group of people. It felt much more like a family reunion than any real family reunion I’ve known.

Albuquerque
Now, back in Albuquerque. Cymbeline is open, and I’m rock climbing at a gym two or three times a week, mountain biking, and staring at the river and the mountains by myself, mainly. I start training in a couple of week with the local circus guru – choreographer for Cirque and Cats and so forth. Her daughter is training and needs company.

I put my things in storage in Chicago last October 18th, to go to New York with Hunchback. This year, I flew to Chicago on October 18th to remount it again. We started rehearsals for The Acting company on my 25th birthday last year. We opened Cymbeline two days after my 26th.

If there’s a luckier bastard out there, I haven’t met him.

Headshots

Professional life by democratic rule.

If you follow this thing, you probably know me. So go ahead and weigh in on my new headshots. Viewable here.

The photos should introduce me accurately, and make me look fabulous(ly myself).

Please vote for three by leaving comments on the photos. If you feel like leaving more comments, please feel free. If you feel like emailing me, please feel free.

Thanks, folks.

Update: It’s come to my attention that you gotta be e member to leave comments on Flickr. Silly of me. Leave comments here, or shoot me an email.

Big News / 09-10 Season / Pronoia

In my last post, I intimated big news as the impetus for my being back in Brooklyn. Assailed by a barrage of questions (har har) on this news, I am ecstatic to report, dearest readers, that I am in New York because I was cast in an HBO pilot. Which, apparently (famous last words) has been picked up for a whole series.

It’s all pretty freaking weird.

You can google it. It’s Boardwalk Empire, and it’s got a whole host of famous/unbelievable people associated with it. Martin Scorsese is directing it, for one. Marky Mark is an executive producer. Steve Buscemi is on for it. Terence Winter, who wrote and produced for the Sopranos, is writing it. More personally unbelievable, motherfucking Omar from The Wire is on board, and as the cherry on the cake: the hot chick from Trainspotting.

So… yeah.

I don’t know. Ah, it’s great? Roast Beef said it best: Everything about it is so big you ain’t got the synaptic bandwidth to process the girth of it all.

How the hell did I get here? A complicated series of maneuvers involving siblings of high-school idols and an impromptu (illegaly?) remounted Henry put the right person in to see us in Henry V at Baruch College in Mahattan. They must have liked the show, because they brought a a quarter of our cast in to read for their series. They hated my first read. On a whim, they decided to have me read for a different character altogether, one for which I had not prepared. So I did, and they must have liked that one. Three of us from Henry got sent on to Marty. And then, the whole thing got shot down: that character was Italian, and nobody told the casting office. Boo. Three weeks later, I’m called in for another character. I can’t go in, being in new Mexico, so they send in my second tape, and two weeks after that, I’m buying plane tickets to New York.

Justice.

Oh, yeah. And as if that wasn’t ridiculous enough, elsewhere in Big Newsland (belatedly):

I got a job touring with Lookingglass Theatre’s Alice (the same one I understudied last summer), going to Actor’s Theatre of Louisville and to Syracuse Stage in upstate NY, with an understudy dogleg at the end. It begins August 1, and runs through next May. The schedule is funny, and it puts me on the loose for a few months in winter. So… I’ll be in Albuquerque trying to get some film/TV work, hoping for the good graces of my old Agent. The writers at HBO and the people at Lookingglass all feel pretty good about making both of them work out for me.

Now Lookingglass. This is a theatre that I love. By which I mean: I felt profoundly happy at lookingglass, by which I mean: I felt as if I had fiund a kind of a home there. They put a damn spell on me, and while I don’t think that everything I’ve seen of theirs is perfect, I’m deeply interested in the problems they are trying to solve, and I think I can help them. And I want to. As a bonus (jesus, more?) along with the expected set of wonderful people that I’ll get to work with there, for at least some section of it, I get to work with Molly from 500 Clown I find this out while I’m helping them load in a set at Steppenwolf, a few days before being introduced to Tracy Letts for the second time in three weeks…

Which all put together is like… The Dream™, right?

All of which makes me positively giddy with satisfaction, excitement, and enthusiasm of a deep, insistent quality that I have maybe never known. Also, it’s really, really humbling to think of how capricious it all is. Literally every one of these auditions I nearly missed. By a day, by an hour, by a fortunate and arbitrary choice of plane tickets, by the health of another actor – by the whims of some indolent god. Luck has held my hand at every step. All of it is so freaking unlikely , so filled with narrowly averted missed opportunities and fantastical lucky breaks…

It’s enough to give one a serious sense of pronoia: the sneaking suspicion that the whole world is conspiring to shower you with blessings.

Pronoia can be a kind of faith, or hope.
Can be.
In my case, it simply appears to be factually, literally true.

6.09

Chicago! What a great tour stop.

I’ve been here three weeks and it’s been nothing short of grand. Weekends in Michigan on a farm, burning a friend in effigy for his fortieth, a party at Tracy Lett’s house (google August: Osage County, it’s unbelievable), days at the beach, fire spinning parties, large and small, free tickets at Steppenwolf, a $100 mountain bike that would retail for $1200, grills on decks in the setting Chicago summer sun, 40 mile bike rides to Evanston, unicycle practice in the alleys (alleys!), free coffee (the greatest coffee ever to touch my lips), great kitchen equipment, stability, and so forth.

But tonight, I’m packing my bags, and it feels so good. Like drinking, but cleaner. Washing away all the clinging detritus. I find myself aggravated at the things that I’m leaving behind here in Chicago. I want to put it all in a bag, erase my presence.

I miss the bus.

That feels like a confession.

My friend and current roommate is developing a one-man show about a man who tried to sail around the world by himself. He went mad. But one of his rivals in the race dropped out (just before winning) in order to continue sailing round the world by himself. In many important ways I do not understand this. But I understand maybe the tiniest taste of it.

Never Going Home.

I’m headed to New York for two week. I can’t seem to escape its orbit. I question my reationship to the city. On the list now: summerstock somewhere unexpected, and another tour next fall. I don’t want a home. Probably soon someday I will. But not now.

Change of Address

This site has recently moved, from http//freight.wordpress.com.

This is being done in an ongoing effort to clean up my digital persona. Also, while I am still cuckoo for trains, it was always a misleading title and address.

Thank you for updating your bookmarks, brains, and feeds. Please enjoy the music.

Purchase, NY

Coupe le tour.

Its been a hell of a ride, and I’m feeling too much of the tension between nostalgia and relief to really offer any kind of retrospective.

I love New York. I’m not moving, but I spent more time there this last calendar year than anywhere else, and it was nothing but aggressively, relentlessly good to me. It no longer intimidates me, but it still scares me – in how it restructures your brain, in how nobody notices the sound sculpture in Times Square (the perfect metaphor). It’s a relief to be back in the desert, where there is space, and breeze.

What’s to say about Purchase? Same old city with a different name… They laughed at some things, they didn’t at others. There were establishments for food and for liquor, there was landscape, there were buildings, we got on and off the bus, in and out of a hotel room?

We said goodbyes, we drove in to the city, we said goodbyes again… It was all surreal. I don’t know. Six intimate months together, and then poof – what do you say? There is both too much and nothing left. Similarly, I don’t have any way of wrapping up my writings on the subject.

As with everything, it just ends:
learn every room long enough to make it to the door -
then you hear it click shut behind you.

(Never) Going Home

Side One
1. Tour – Henry Rollins (excerpt)
2. I Wanna Be Sedated – Social D
3. This Is My Life – Firewater
4. Tiny Idyll – Jolie Holland
5. Truth Is – Brother Ali
6. You – Atmosphere
7. Fuck and Run – Liz Phair
8. Whole Wide World – Wreckless Eric
9. Get It While You Can – Janis Joplin
10. Dilate – Ani D
11. I Wanna Die – Jolie Holland
12. No Future (Road Song) – Wingnut Dishwashers Union
13. A Brief Yet Triumphant Intermission – Against Me!

Side Two
14. Three Legged Dog – Firewater
15. Going To Georgia – Atom and his Package
16. Burn Your Life Down – Tegan and Sara
17. Falling Without Knowing – Tilly and the Wall
18. Trading in Your Friends – Liar’s Handshake
19. Ramblin’ Man – Hank Williams
20. The Last Harmonica Blues – The Seatbelts
21. Wayfaring Stranger – Johnny Cash
22. Tired of Being Alone – Al Green
23. Sax Rohmer #1 – The Mountain Goats
24. Weird to Be Back – Firewater
25. Keep the Car Running – Arcade Fire

South Orange, NJ

Previously, my only experience with NJ was rather pleasant. Taking the train from Penn Station out to a friend’s house, where she lives with rabbits. The rabbits eat everything below two feet, and are adorable. My friend Namir is from Jersey. I like Namir. Seems like a great place. The automatic disgust from any New Yorker at the mention of the home of the Boss seemed a little unnecessary.

I understand, now.

Popping my head out of our hotel for about ten minutes was enough education: a Ruby Tuesday’s, a derelict diner, a giant mall, several identical hotels in a row, and storage containers. Storage containers of various kinds and sizes. Storage containers in motion, or in stillness, in a variety of depressing colors. Storage containers and the machinery to deal with them, as far as the eye dare wander.

So I holed up all day in the hotel. I’ve learned a lot about the fine art of turning a hotel room into a personal gym: chair for the dips, dresser for the situps, chair again for the incline pushups, space between the beds for streching and leg lifts, etc. In my personal gym, I spent all day hammering out a mix for the cast and crew, eating crackers with honey butter and cheese. Some true playlist discipline, after the old manner of the mixtape.

The show was in a theatre sharing a lobby with a movie theater. Wild idea. My rabbit-toting friend came out to the show, and after some pizza, she drove me home in her tiny red sportscar, on the lap of her boyfriend. A turnpike, an industrial megaplex, one hopelessly overmatched gps system and nine hundred missed exits later, his legs were numb and my neck was an elbow, but we got there.

Next up, Purchase, NY. Final stop.

Ogdensburg, NY

Company Manager, before arriving: The hotel is in the middle of Nowhere, guys. I’m sorry. There were just no better options.

We arrive to perfectly suitable hotel rooms, look out the window, and discover that we are the proud temporary owners of a gigantic lawn, sprawling lazily down to some water. On the other is Canada. We have a private dock, and the weather is sunny, lightly breezy, at about 78˚. With nothing to do for about a million hours, suddenly we all feel as if we are in a marketing brochure for The Acting Company: Take a protracted road trip all across America with your 30 closest friends, soaking up the best that this great nation has to offer!

We even got a chance to hang out with some of the crew, all of whom I have come to dearly appreciate, and all of whom I almost never get to see outside the theatre, or with the lights on. There was much carousing, though the fire-pit went sadly unused. Firewood more difficult to come by than we had hoped.

We played a high school, which was fine at night. In the morning (9:30!) we played for high school students, which was a riot. The Italians do not say “Break a leg.” They say “Boca lupo”, to which one responds “Creppe lupo!” Translated: “Into the mouth of the wolf.” “I kill the wolf!” We killed the wolf. They quit cat-calling and they sat down, stopped texting, and they even maybe liked it. I daresay we may even be getting a handle on The Spy.

Next up, South Orange, NJ

Burlington, VT

This looks to be a strange week.

After a week off in NYC, we’re back on the road in the Northeast for a week. It’s all basically over already, mentally. A strange nostalgic hiccup. The victory lap?

The weather in Burlington was stupid beautiful, and after some cart-food dumplings eaten listening to a street-performer on accordion, I went down to the lake to soak it in. It’s easy to forget in the narrative I build about my life that I spent so much time in new England as a kid. Almost every summer. So it’s strangely comforting to see stacks of wood next to old shingled houses, see middle aged guys in the getup: ties, jeans, and beards.

We taught a workshop before the show on Shakespeare’s language, which at first threatened to be like some of our very most awkward. Two very shy seeming teenage girls together with their father (very suspicious of the whole affair), two octogenarians, one unattached teenager, one unattached woman maybe 40, and one enthusiastic member of the educational department. Defying patterns, these were unexpectedly enthusiastic, and in their parsing of the text, taught us a lot of new things about it. Amazing how you can listen to a speech for six months, teach it a dozen times, and suddenly hear it for the first time.

King Henry was propositioned at a bar (whose soundtrack was killer and whose bartender was ninja) by a drunken college kid: “Hey… want to do some E with me?” I envy his gargantuan cool.

Next up, Ogdensburg, NY

Staunton, VA

We stopped in this town purely to hang out.

It’s a Quainte Towne. Ice cream Shoppes and Antiques. Oh, and – Stonewall fucking Jackson’s house is there. Old cigar-smoking republicans in blue blazers and khaki pants use it now for high-school reunions. The modern South.

It’s also home of the American Shakespeare Center. They play in a replica of the Blackfriars theatre, home to Shakespeare and his players before they moved over to the Globe. They also do pretty original practices staging. For you laypeople, that means (among other things) that the lights are on the whole time – equally on stage and on you.

They were good enough to get us tickets to see the shows they have running right now. Comedy of Errors, and Hamlet. It’s how I was trained, and I’m sold on it. (It seems odd that such a giant theatre like the Guthrie should put its students in the hands of fanatics and lovers of the original practices staging movement when they themselves are so…. well, their production of Two Gentlemen of Verona was set in a TV studio, and they had do-wop singing between scenes.) I, for one, am better able to hear the plays in that way than in any other way I have seen. It seems so natural, so obvious, and makes the rules we have set up about audience involvement and fourth walls seem so silly, so beside the point.

Our last night in town, their acting company invited our Acting Company over for a party to their housing: sort of a ramshackle old building with an idiosyncratic outlay of parlors and bedrooms (brothel?). It was somewhere between the house that your friends who started an art-band lived in, a frat house, and a victorian manor. They’ve been touring, off and on, since last September, we since January. There aren’t that many people touring nationally with Shakespeare. I estimate realistically that we had fully a quarter of the current community of nationally touring Shakespearean actors present in that house, eating leftover wedding cake and trading war stories.

Next up, Penn State.