Dream Vision Memory

What follows is not true.

I suspect there is olive oil in my vegan boullion.

That part is true.

Self finds those who irregularly watch football suddenly waxing expertical about all things receiver/kicker/firstandten heartburn inducing.

This is also true.

Valentine’s is soon. I read a YA teen romance book one evening last week and found it very satisfying, but not inspiring.

You should decide if that is true or no.

The boy ought to have shaved. He reminded self and others of the-boy-we-had-to-have-mom-tell-we-weren’t-home-when-he-called-uck-it’s-him-again-no-i’m-not-home.

I’m undecided.

I have been preoccupied for the whole of this year with the demise of a relationship (not my own) between a husband/wife team that were creatively involved and had known (dated) since they were babies. First love, both. Huge creative influences, though one of the pair was surely the genius and the other the wild success. And it has bothered me disproportionately. For. A. Year.

What finally struck me (as I was listening to a song) was that music from ten years ago held promise. Promise, of course, reverberated strong: that precious glass ball that holds at once who I was and who I was going to be. And as I listened to this song, all I could think was how deeply sorry I was for the loss of my friends innocence and possibility. But the possibility — which in their case had been realised — was not enough. Or at least not as splendid in its realization as it was in its potential. The demise of their relationship is more than the accrued hurts inflicted on each other, but the farewell to their child-selves.

I can’t get over how terrible and inevitable it is.

I have a million and one things I need to do in the next 24 hours, but I will be so overy unhappy if I don’t remember exactly how I feel this morning following an exhilarating, crazy, energetic, vibrant performance. It’s no surprise that Wendy and I have been ardent fans of Neil Finn for-, um, like,-ever. Following the demise of Crowded House in the 90s, we were mutually elated that he was pushing forward with a solo career. We were also mutually pleased that we both shared such excitement over this one man and his music . . . it’s gone on to be one of the four corner of our friendship in this inviolate way. Neil Finn, to us, speaks of more than music, but of joyous creativity, exacting details, and the roller-coaster of riding The Moment. I always feel like making beautiful things after listening to his music and seeing him play live always makes me want to make people feel alive through art. Loving this guy has been about loving life and the people we share it with and building a theatre company around that vibrancy.

I was both excited and a little put off when I found out Crowded House was reforming. It was something I though would be beautiful, but maybe too sad. Maybe not as intimate as being a Neil Finn fan was. After seeing them for the third time last night, I can say the reunion is both of those things. But it is also a testament to friendship and the pure unadulterated joy that comes from doing what one loves while surrounded by the people one loves best. Finn has always been moody and groovy, a little melancholy. And seeing Crowded House — well, that’s not there anymore except in the music. It’s replaced by a new version of him that is happy. Just plain happy. And as much as I like the moody and melancholy, the happiness carries a lot further.

For example, I cannot wipe the smile off my face as I replay last night’s show. I woke up with this grin, and it ain’t going away.

Wendy and I did hop the barrier to the orchestra at the Beacon last night (along with the horde that NF invited in). Holy shit is it fun hopping a barrier, asses in the air, pocketbooks swinging, the daze of adjusting and being so close to the musician (big sigh Mark Hart), a best friend saying “happy birthday” — because that rush makes it happy happy happy. Security removed us citing unsafe floor and I think I’m glad they did in the long run cause a collapsed orchestra pit could have really sucked. But . . .

As security was removing is, NF said something along the lines of “they can’t make you go if you all stay” — then he jumped off the stage in the middle of Don’t Dream It’s Over (yay! kill the sacred cow — if you can’t mess with your most popular song and allow it to be holy some days and smash it on others, you destory the potency of the piece! yay! viva!) at which point Wendy and I became separated and I scooted back into the pit. It was wild. Eventually, he had to get back up to the stage and be a musician instead of a rabble rouser, but it was grand and democratic for a few minutes. When they started playing again, security kept driving me gently out again, but would lose their focus with all the tall people so I kept evading them and scooting back up to the feet of the masters.

It was the youngest I’ve felt in 15 years.

And somehow, I kept my glasses on and purse with me the whole time.

Lessons: kill sacred cows. Jump barriers. Sing loud. Be democratic. Allow that a lack of intimacy can translate to something else, something larger and different, but equally awesome. Beautiful lights can change our perception of reality (must ask what those lights were — holy moley, momma, talk about pretty). Nothing better than seeing a father and son jam the fuck out with each other, except seeing a person doing what is his/her bliss without criticism or condition.

Ok, really must go work now. But feel so marvelously alive and ready and energized.

Taking a break from work really messes with your head. It hardly operates as a break because the time is consumed with wondering what is next. And all the “what next-es” can start to pile up and snarl until they get attention. Worse is the paralysing fear that you have somehow forgotten to do what you know perfectly well how to do. And so a blank piece of paper or an empty computer screen begins to feel like it should be poked and prodded with a stick before approaching, for it might bite. The Empty’s got fangs, man.

So right at this moment I’m feeling like I ought to be doing any number of things other than what I’m doing. Which is okay, it’ll pass. But in the meantime, I wish I was fabulously rich or climbing a mountain or inventing a revolutionary kitchen gadget or something exciting.

It has been quite some time. Post Force. Post wedding. Phew. What a year. I broke out in hives on May 27th — convinced on some deep, low-rumbling level that I was about to step into the void. But instead, just day to day life.

But break’s over. Been sitting on some ideas, letting them stew for the past few months. Nothing quite as large in scope as Force, but somehow that will iron itself out. Small relationships before big ideas. Trying to infuse my life with some new music (or at least music I haven’t listened to in a long while), but am afraid to excise all Force-related music and/or all Neil Finn tunes from my ipod. When we got Crowded House tickets, I erased all Crowdie music from my ipod so it could be like a second virginity, but life without Neil? God, I don’t know.

Been taking very long 5-7 mile walks. Clear the mind. Have imaginary conversations. Allow for day-dreaming. What a chore. That it takes me three miles to start thinking of anything novel or clear . . . I wish there was a defragment-izer for brains like there is for computers.

Been having crazy dreams or not sleeping at all. Had a detective-esque nightmare Saturday night and kept putting off waking so I could continue working the story out Sunday morning. It’s not nearly so dramatic now that I’m awake. Friday I had a dream about an editor I know — I had to have a discussion with him, but he was across the room, room after room after room. There were all these sly looks shot over people’s heads and from over conference room tables, looks that said “in just five minutes we’ll be able to get out here and talk about things that matter.” But we never made it to the spacious land of free discourse.

The promise of a worthwhile conversation.

nytheatre.com review
Martin Denton · January 27, 2007

Aisling Arts’ Force trilogy is the best new American play of the season so far; I haven’t been this caught up in or affected by a piece of theatre since Angels in America. The size and scope of the project contribute mightily to this: clocking in at 6-1/2 hours, in three parts, Force is indisputably epic in scale. (Kudos right now to conceivers Bryn Manion and Wendy Remington, and to the dedicated and talented 17-member cast.) It’s a show that tackles big themes, too: nothing less than the essential human question of our place in a complicated world. Each of us seems so insignificant in the grand scheme of things, yet every move we make feels so tremendously important. How do we reconcile such a paradox?

It feels especially resonant in our post-9/11 world. On the one hand, we have an impulse to create, to be heard, to make a difference; on the other hand, confronted with mammoth catastrophes, either natural ones like Hurricane Katrina or manmade ones like Darfur, we wonder what any one person can actually accomplish, and retreat into comfort zones of safety and quiet. So it is with the characters we meet in Force, which is written and directed by Manion with such a wise and organic understanding of our shared humanity that over and over again I found myself reflecting on how very much like something in my own life was something said or shown on stage.

At the center of the play are a married couple, Jack and Anne Kavanaugh. Jack was a war correspondent in Kosovo during the Milosevic period; we never find out all that he witnessed and went through, but it was terrible enough to send him into a second career as a journalism professor in New York City. He’s also the author of a best-selling book about his wartime experiences. Anne is an artist who has stopped making art; she’s originally from Vermont and came to the big city to pursue her gift, but what she wants now more than anything is a child, and after two miscarriages she’s looking at adoption as the solution. Jack doesn’t want to adopt; but the differences between the two go deeper than that. Jack, fundamentally, is on a quest for the soul that he thinks he lost in Belgrade; he wants to leave the world better than he found it, but he’s not sure how to do that anymore, or even if he can. Anne isn’t interested in posterity or the big picture; she wants a husband who authentically communicates with and cares for her, and a family to tend and nurture.

Their marriage bond rests in a singular, almost magical circumstance that somehow gives it more potency and urgency than it might otherwise have. For the two of them met on a subway platform, quite by accident; except that each had dreamed of the other months before, on the very same night—the very same dream!—half a world away from one another.

The progress of the Kavanaughs’ rocky relationship forms the arc of the play, but numerous other people drift in and out of their lives, offering contrast, commentary, or complication. Jack’s flaky brother Brian, a biologist, accompanies Jack on a return trip to Kosovo; Brian’s long lost love Cassie meets up with Jack on a New York park bench in one of those chance encounters that defy logic and coincidence. Anne’s brother Rob, who was struck by lightning and suffers from memory loss as a result, falls in love with a woman named Sara whose car breaks down in front of his Vermont home. Anne’s sister Claire tries to cope with the responsibilities of being mother to her new step-son, while Anne’s brother Dan has an on-again/off-again relationship with the mother of his child, who has resisted marriage for some time now.

The narrative spins forward, but nonlinear digressions—flashbacks and flashforwards—dot the landscape. Connections of every variety—missed, unexpected, magical—abound in this play about how alike we all are under the skin, how much what we’re looking for is the same as what everyone else is looking for. Rob has a dream that’s exactly like something that happens to Brian; Sara and Dan talk to each other through Dan’s stereo; a woman named Lotte disappears from her home one day and drifts in and out of the other characters’ lives spectrally, like some half-remembered fragment of the past.

Manion creates these characters so vividly and honestly that it’s impossible not to get caught up in all of their lives. There are three plays that comprise Force—Wanderlust, Threshold, and Convergence—and the writing is gorgeous; there’s a scene in Wanderlust, for example, in which Anne and her three siblings reunite, that feels uncannily like a real family interacting in their dining room. Here’s a sample from Convergence, Jack confiding in a brother he hasn’t really spoken to in years:

I wanted to be an astronaut. Chuck Yeager. Yeager was never an astronaut. I don’t think I knew that when I was a kid. Maybe I did. I wasn’t stupid. Maybe the outer space part wasn’t what appealed to me. Maybe it was Yeager. The Yeagerness of Yeager. The respect without all the attention. The under the radar admiration. The skill. The daring. The dedication. He broke the sound barrier for Cripesake. Annie hates flying. A plane crashed in her backyard when she was a kid. A Cessna. Two people died, and her family’s dog caught fire. They had to put it to sleep.

Manion’s staging looks simple but is meticulous and precise. There are just a few set pieces (chairs, tables, etc.), with the locales suggested by the vivid language, evocative lighting and soundscape, and the stage equivalent of driftwood (a chalkboard, some books and magazines piled here and there, postcards scattered around the floor) that suggest the world these people inhabit without having to indicate it.

The ensemble is uniformly strong. At the center of it all, in a towering performance, is Bradley Wells as Jack, full of contradictions and paradoxes as he makes his journey into himself to try to save himself and his marriage. (That he seems unaware that he’s doing either of those things is tribute to Wells’s brilliance here.) Angela Sommerfeld’s Anne really comes into her own in Convergence, blossoming into a full-blooded woman trying to salvage a life that’s gone wildly off track. Offering particularly outstanding support are Shawn Mahoney, whose portrayal of the brain-damaged Rob is at once heart-warming and heart-breaking; Sarah Stephens, who plays Jack’s Serbian contact Eva as well as the “breathing coach” of a little girl who holds her breath for a living; Aaron Mathias, hugely convincing and likeable as Jack’s brother Brian (Mathias and Wells have remarkable chemistry together, as well); Melissa Menzie as the enigmatic and almost completely silent Lotte; and R. Patrick Alberty, who plays Chairman David Kubrecski, Jack’s student and off-kilter symbolic alter ego (he also functions as comic relief; Alberty is very funny in the role).

A quick disclaimer: Convergence is included in my upcoming anthology Plays and Playwrights 2007. But I would be saying everything I’ve said here whether or not that was the case.

Force is an extraordinary achievement. It can be seen on three separate evenings, or (the way I saw it) on a single day. If you have time for it, this is the way to experience this play: an immersive, involving, thrilling day of exquisite theatre. Either way, if you yearn for drama that’s potent and meaningful, you really don’t want to miss Force; there’s nothing on stage in NYC right now with as much breadth and humanity.

Sam & I started looking at rings on Friday. Wedding rings. Rings that we’ll wear for a long-assed time.

Such an activity makes me realize two things: 1. how much I really just plain like Sam and 2. it’s important to listen to yourself when making decisions about things you’re going to keep for a long time.

And just now I was listening to Dar Williams on Pandora. It reminded me of Thornes in the winter and post Iron Horse wanderings. Which reminds me of a part of myself I’ve rediscovered in LIC. Slow moving cafe land. Small shop world. Neighborly chats. And alone time. Quality alone time.

I hate having to title these things. Capacious was the word that jumped into my head, though it has nothing to do with what I’ve currently got on my mind.

Despite my claim that I was going to write about Force rehearsals, I haven’t. Work has been harried and my concentration so poor that I haven’t had the patience or desire to write anything here for a while. But this past week, it’s occured to me that I ought to start dumping some of the effluvia I’ve swimming in my head into some sort of recepticle.

Going into last week, I had high hopes for an accomplished vacation wherein I would smartly tick off monsters from my to-do list. I fancied a to-done list. Instead, time flew at an insane ratem, and I was hypnotized by my parents’ television. Movies I watched:
Elizabeth (HBO miniseries with Helen Mirren and Jeremy Irons)
Dirty Dancing
Love Letter
The Island
Tenacious D: Pick of Destiny
Chumscrubber
Assault on Precinct 13
Harry Potter IV

It’s only impressive if you think about this happening in the course of four days. I think there were more movies, too. But my mind was like a gummy bear.

I’ve started getting up with Sam — or, rather, getting up around the same time he gets up. By Wednesday, it’s increasingly difficult to justify the need to be out of bed by 6:30am when I could sleep until 8am and still flounder my way to work early. But I made a stern decision to be stern with myself and sternly moderate the way I’ve been handling time. I’d been getting everything done and paying some attention to the things I needed to, but again, brain like gummy bear. So, the only way to defeat slack mindedness is to go clean for a while and make more time. Which means, sleep less. Walk more. Incorporate some daydream time into a life that is very full of obligatory exercises these days: print this, revise that, map traffic flow, format this, schedule that, etc . . .

So this morning, I’m up taking my morning walk and about to do my crunches out on the pier when this old Chinese guy comes up to me and starts offering me tips. Okay. What I really wanted was to be alone. Please. But he was smiley and pointing to his head of full black hair saying “six four, six four.” Okay. He’s sixty four. He asked my name. Anne. That’s the name I give people I don’t want to know. Then he asked if I was married. Of course, I’m married. Then he hugged and kissed my cheak and told me I was soft and had a movie star face. Then, things got weird. He asked me to hold his dogs’ leashes while he showed me Chinese exercises which looked a lot like Pilates. Then he commanded that I lie down and do them. Then he started poking my stomach. I grabbed my watch and insisted, wow, it’s time for me to go. Then he started poking my shoulder and tried to hug me again and . . . well, it was awful and weird and weird and awful. It just wasn’t one of those situations where it would have been right to tell him to fuck off.

I was alarmed by how unangry I was about this. It was wasn’t worth anger. Just a mild annoyance that I can’t do my stomach crunches on the pier without my guard up that this guy won’t come around and try to poke my stomach again.

Anyway.

I have also been bothered by rumours that an old friend is going through a break-up. I don’t have his contact info these days, and I’m sending out witchy waves to the stratosphere so serendipity will magnetize our fields or something appropriately new agey and reverse the energy and it will occur to him to give me a shout. Or maybe I’ll find his info in an old suitcase or as a makeshift bookmark in a book I haven’t picked up in five years. In the meantime, I think I shall keep this on a low simmer on my backburner.

Rehearsals are really fab. It sounds limp to say, but everyone is so nice. We have a warn, nice community wrapped around these ideas, making this thing happen. And it’s a good dose of purple every day. And we’re soaring through the material at an unimaginable rate. I’m excited to think about how much detailed work will make its way to the stage come Jan 25.

Minor greivance: now that figured out how to use the sound system at the NYIC, I plug in precious and have all my music at the ready. Only I don’t have all the aisling standards onmy ipod because I don’t want to listen to that shit when I’m doing my stomach crunches on the pier with my headphones on so the 64 year old Chinese guy will stop trying to feel me up and making me feel guilty because of the language barrier. I think I need an all aisling ipod.

Other random details I need to dump:
Yuri got a new table for the terrace.
Brought cats up to Massachusetts for Thanksgiving — zealously. I was surprisingly obsessed with getting them up there at the last minute. Buddha peed in the car and cried until I let him out of the cage. But man, did they have a blast in the big house. They have slept consistently since we’ve been back in New York — neither of them could sleep in MA due to extreme curiousity/exploration overload.
Thinking about Meeting Mr. Bishop — was old idea never finished. Want to finish.
Am listening to folk music again these days, right now, in fact. This was brought about by Playboy.
Don’t like vanilla chai teabags bought yesterday. Not strong enough.

Have now sufficiently dumped brain gunk.

By far one of the most imperious people I have ever known. A true goddess among men.

And here (finally) some music as complicated and omni-leo-present as the girl herself. Take a listen.

http://www.joanaspolicewoman.com/listen.htm

It’s been ages.

I’m not sure I even remember to do this anymore. But I must chronicle Force rehearsals if for no other reason than to say, “this happened. this was. and is.”

Last night we began rehearsals on what has been a project 3+ years in the making. An epic play of minor proportions, a six hour journey into the lives of barely extraordinary people. As we were reading Wanderlust last night it was so hot, I was so flushed — not overcome, it was just hot in the room. I couldn’t help but think how heady this whole experience is. Caring about these people is a sell. Jack can be such a prick. Anne doesn’t behave well. At least she’s not a limp noodle cry-baby anymore. Dan digs his hole deeper and deeper. Everything’s a little more clear and a little more ambiguous at the same time. Why should Sara stay? Why should Dan go to Nicole? Why do Jack and Anne love each other?

The answer is simple: because.

Tonight we read the not-yet-done-man-will-it-ever-be-done-please-someone-cut-me-off-from-my-own-interior-voices-of-negativity-and-regret-and-just-finish-the-damn-thing Threshold. What a bitch this play has been. I’d like for it to at least be decent when it finally goes out for its big moment in the cold February sun. But I tend to think Threshold is going to be like the smudgy faced kid with snot on her shirt and her skirt tucked in her underwear standing with a jump rope in her hand in a puddle obliviously singing songs she doesn’t even know she knows and obviously calculating improbable sums in her little head — sort of fascinating and sort of disturbing, but mostly just there. Doing her thing unnoticed by most of us, occasionally evoking frustrated pity.

Which isn’t a horrible fate for a play. There’s just not much white light in Threshold. That’s all. It’s always been such a blue play.

What’s stranger for me to contemplate is that nothing happens in all three of these plays. I suppose I thought Threshold would be all action and insight and direct energy. But it didn’t turn out that way.

Hm. “It just didn’t turn out that way.” Sounds so fatalistic for something so deliberately created, doesn’t it?