Open and Running - 4/11/06

Staunton VA - It's Tuesday evening, and after these past two days off I'm feeling OK. By Sunday evening, after our official opening weekend, I was pretty beat and my throat was a little weak, but two days of rest has been good. Monday I took a road trip into the Alleghany Mountains from Lewisburg, WV up to Cass, WV, and then back across to Staunton VA. I got a look at the Greenbrier River Valley, and there is a nice 60-mile trail which runs along it, good for bicycling or hiking. And you can also rent river tubes for a day of tubing down the river. May have do some of that before long. I also caught a sunset over the Appalachians, while the moon rose in the east. Some beautiful scenery. Today I finished my taxes, wrote out my index cards for doing the Blackfriars Playhouse tours, and am set for the catches we'll be doing in the R3 pre-show. Then I spent the afternoon listening to the opening day game at Yankee Stadium against the KC Royals. The temperature was in the low 70s. Very, very good for the soul.

The opening weekend at Blackfriars went well overall. There wasn't much of an "opening weekend" atmosphere around, but that seemed to trouble other people more than it troubled me. It somehow seemed anticlimactic to me to think of shows we have been doing since September as "opening." So I did not concern myself too much with that issue. Planet seems to be a show which really has gotten people going. We have learned to play the show with more restraint out of necessity at the Blackfriars, because that space is just so acoustically alive. Nevertheless, audiences large and small so far have really enjoyed the show tremendously. Much Ado went off well on Saturday evening, and the Sat. matinee of Richard III also went very well. I have noticed particularly with R3 that it plays so much better in the Blackfriars. Perhaps it's just the atmosphere, but the words seem more natural and alive there, making the show more accessible, I think. Anyway, I think it all went very well. The Sunday matinee of Planet had a small but no less enthusiastic audience. There was a row of middle-aged women in the rear of the gallery that were just rocking with every song. That's how it seems to go.

It's also been a good week for my children. My daughter Jenna just bought a house in Framingham MA and moved in over the weekend. My oldest son Brian won a playwriting contest at Oswego which came with a $100 prize for a play he wrote. And Eric, who is rehearsing the role of Bill from The Hot L Baltimore up at the University of Buffalo, was put on the wait list for Carnegie Mellon's BFA Acting program as well as being accepted to University of Northern Illinois. He had to write an essay for CMU and got that done and sent in. So we shall see.

I have a funny feeling that a lot of my posts from here on in might be a bit shorter. Since there is no new locale to report about every other day, there is nothing much to write about but the shows. Since the shows are now in rep, they probably won't change too much over time. Being located in the actor housing complex, there may be more to report there, but I tend to doubt I'll be so much in the mix that there will be anything to report. And I find that I am not taking as many pictures as I have been. So this blog may either become quite boring, or it may begin to turn into what it will eventually become once my contract ends; just general musings I have about theatre in general, and events and situations at SUNY Fredonia once I return there in the fall.

I can say that talk has already begun about what people will be doing once they complete their contracts: where they will live, where they will work, etc. Often I tend to forget that this gig is the sum total of my colleagues' lives, and once it's done they have to go back and find the next thing to do with their lives. Some people have plans set: Alyssa will be joining a company doing Oklahoma, Chris is going to a gig in Ohio doing Our Town, Greg will be joining another touring group similar to S2 run by his friend Dennis (an alum of ShenShakes), Tyler will be doing the Tragical Mirth tour next year as Cyrano, Puck and Casca. Kevin, Jessica, Sarah, Olivia, Daniel and Andrew have less certain plans, although I think Jessica and Andrew will be doing the Philadelphia consolidated auditions two days after we close here (both have connections in Philly). So they are all in the process of finding "the next thing." I plan to take the rest of the summer off and perhaps do a little traveling before I return to teaching.

Finally, the Blackfriars Backstage Podcast for Planet came out the other day, so if you want to get it, follow the instructions from the last post. It's pretty good, and I'm on it! -TWL