July 18-20: Missouri

Saturday, July 18^th, 2009

A lot of people expressed surprise that I was returning to Kansas City, since our numbers last year weren’t great and we had a few stressful experiences along the way. But, hey – it’s close and it’s cheap, so it’s relatively low-risk. More to the point, it’s a young Fringe (at five years it’s heading out of toddlerhood in people years; I guess that means that the Minnesota Fringe is well into its adolescence, and starting to notice boys. And girls. Because the MN Fringe is totally bi), and there’s a certain excitement to getting to jump on board a Festival as it’s just starting to achieve wider recognition. Plus, our numbers did start to pick up towards the end of our 2008 run, so I’m curious to see if I can now continue to build on that.

Arrived at my billeter’s place, a stunningly schwank apartment that is clean. Very, very clean. Like, Felix Unger clean. I, on the other hand, live in a tepid pool of my own filth. Spent some time exploring the neighborhood. I’m currently located in the Westport district, a prosperous area bearing signs boasting “Real people. Real places. Real life.” (Which suggests the kind of cultural elitism that drives me up the wall – so¸ your implied assertion is that the people who live on the other side of town from you aren’t real, yes?) So it’s a nice enough area, but it’s not the Kansas City I remember.

Then I drove down to the Fringe in the Crossroads theatre district. Crumbling warehouses, wailing sirens – there’s the Kansas City I remember.

(So one thing my hosts in both Chicago and DC asserted – independently of each other – is the role that artists in play in transforming the landscape of a city. Their assertion runs thusly:

1) area becomes economically depressed;

2) artists move in (presumably because the spaces are

a. cheap, and

b. because only artists are dumb enough to invest so much into operating their respective businesses at a severe loss);

3) gay couples move in nearby; and

4) neighborhood becomes gentrified.

If this assertion is true, then it begs the question of whether or not artists are a symptom or a cause of gentrification. It also suggests that Detroit is about to become the arts capitol of the nation.)

Was too early to check in at Fringe Central, so decided to swing by my venue to take a look. Coincidentally happened to arrive at the same time as my venue tech, which granted me a handshake, some face time, and a chance to look around before they set up.

Headed on over to check in, and was pleased to shake hands with and be introduced to the various staff members I’ve corresponding with online. Ended up hanging out for about twenty minutes, telling jokes and sharing stories of the various Fringes that we’d all worked. When I glanced back into the main area, I was grabbed by the arm and promptly given a tour of the building.

Is this what I’ve been missing? Midwestern hospitality? I feel like I’ve made more connections here in a half hour than I did in a week in DC.

Opened up a special weekend edition of the Kansas City Star, since they had an article about the Fringe in there. Guess what their leading image was? That’s right: a half-page splash of my publicity photo, with a caption plugging the show.

I have no idea whether or not that’s going to translate into audience numbers: but either way, this place feels right.

Sunday, July 19^th, 2009

Had my tech rehearsal early this morning. My tech guy’s been super-cool and laid-back about everything.

Lighting is pretty limited – pretty much on and off – which I’m used to on the Fringe circuit. But surprised, this time around, that I find myself missing the cues – the subtle changes in mood, the abrupt blackouts, et cetera – which interests me because it indicates a pretty dramatic turnaround for me – that I now find myself thinking in terms of lighting design and stage pictures, as opposed to solely in text.

Went exploring the Westport area. I enjoyed the Kansas City ribs on my last visit here, but not enough to actively seek them out – so I stopped in a place called the Flea Market, which is, appropriately enough, a bar set in a flea market. They advertised something that had apparently been voted “Best Burger in KC” for two years running. They did not disappoint. You know it’s a good meal when you have to wash the grease off your hands afterwards.

Also swung by a used bookstore. They had an audio adaptation of several short stories by Tolkien (including my single favorite short story of all time, “Leaf By Niggle”), as well as a number of books by Geoffrey Ashe. He’s that rare combination of rigorous scholarship (at least, he usually indicates how much of what he’s saying is derived from solid detective work and how much is speculation) and raw enthusiasm – he’s the medievalist’s answer to Carl Sagan in that respect, I suppose. I picked up two on the cheap, since I’ve nearly burned through what I brought with me. (Just finished Robert de Boron, and am slowly working my way through an abridgement of the Lancelot-Grail Cycle. One of my goals on this trip has been to read all of those remaining Grail texts that I haven’t read yet – I note that most of those are extremely pious in nature, which I found kind of a turn-off at the point in my life when I was first discovering them. I’ve since developed a fascination for medieval theology, so I’m having all kinds of fun digging into them now. Next up: Perlesvaus.)

I’ve seen two mentions of this show in the press, describing this as an attempt to examine the Gulf War through the lens of Arthurian legend. Erm, well, yes – you sort of end up doing that by default in the course of writing it, and there’s a level on which the action of the play can be read as a kind of protracted metaphor for American foreign policy – but my original intention is in fact the reverse: to find a new way of looking at these old stories, and to see if they still have anything to offer us. But I’m struck by the assumption: is there something in my marketing material to suggest that the Gulf War is the point? (Granted, I’ve been pushing that angle, since I’ve learned that a mass audience just doesn’t give a fuck about King Arthur. I have since learned that a mass audience doesn’t give a fuck about the Gulf War.) Or is the assumption that modern political commentary is simply more interesting than the old adventure stories?

--

Checked out the opening-night party, which was already exponentially better than last year – I remember being here in 2008, where most of the after-parties consisted of the Maximum Verbosity crew, 3 Sticks, the staff, and a few stragglers hunched over their beer in the corner. And maybe my expectations have been adjusted, but this place felt hoppin’.

(The T-shirts – although I haven’t yet sold any – have already done their job in terms of building audience interest – I’ve had several people come up to me, peering at it, reading it aloud, offering their various jokes and commentary, and lending me an excellent segue into plugging my show.)

Monday, July 20^th, 2009

A dream…to some. A NIGHTMARE TO OTHERS!

It’s been said that every profession has their own unique nightmares. I know that’s certainly the case in theatre, as most actors will nod in recognition when you mention “actors’ nightmares” – which usually consist of being onstage, unrehearsed, without being able to recall a single line of dialogue.

Now, I used to have these all the time. Only they stopped a few years ago, when I switched from primarily performing the words of others to primarily performing my own. Now?

Now I have writers’ nightmares, in which I find myself onstage, struggling to perform a show that I haven’t written yet. I usually have a few notes scribbled down, consisting of a few vague plot ideas and a couple of one-liners, which I bumble through before a stony-faced crowd.

I wonder what’s going on in my subconscious. And if this is the reason that I suck at improv.

--

I spent most of the day in working. I’m relieved to have finally caught up on my publicity for Boulder and Indianapolis. Still to go: Melbourne. Plus the shows I’m still getting set up for October and December.

Arguably the single most frustrating aspect of doing such a wide tour is the amount of energy I have to spend catching up on publicity – I’d rather be able to focus on the show itself once I hit the road. Oh, well. Tradeoffs in all things.

--

Hit up – and performed at – the previews tonight. The quality of the material seems to be generally high (although I was, once again, the sole performer doing drama).

The event was hosted by a pair of performers doing schtick as outrageous characters. They were both entertaining and did an excellent job, though I maintain my usual dislike for “wacky” MCs: my sense is that the job of a good host is to keep the evening clipping along sharply, not to bring the show to a halt every five minutes.

Classic “straight-man funny-man” stuff, anyway, with a heavy emphasis on Don-Rickles style race-baiting. Managed to subtly keep the audience in the “it’s okay, we’re joking, we’re all just playing around” space without drifting too far into audience discomfort. He found one Hispanic audience member who cheerfully played along: when asked “What do you do for a living?” he replied, without a missing a beat, “draw on social security.”

(I was particularly impressed with the fact that the comic immediately identified me as half-Asian; most people who register anything at all peer at me for a moment and make several wrong guesses.)

Along those lines, the standout act for me was definitely by an Indian performer – the KC Fringe’s first international artist. It was a kind of dance/storytelling performance, a tribute to Mahatma Gandhi, about the moral dilemmas faced by a hunter trying to kill. The performance ended up being part dance, part pantomime, as he shifts into the various characters and animals; while the bulk of his movements are designed to clearly indicate character and action to us, these are punctuated by several that are purely expressionistic. I even found something Chaplinesque in his ability to rapidly switch back and forth between intensity and whimsy.

(Although the content of the piece raised many of the issues I have with Hindu/Buddhist/vegetarian points of view – which is that they tend to sidestep the whole point that we are killing machines. We’re built for it; two hundred thousand years of evolution have made us into the most effective killers in the history of the planet. It’s arguable that our most significant environmental problems emerge from the fact that we’re just too damn good at it.)

--

Part way through the evening, I felt someone tugging roughly at the back of my waistband. Kirsten spent several minutes fussing over my uniform. “You need a belt,” she said, frowning. “And your boots aren’t regulation. Pellinore looks like a sloppy soldier. He’d get his ass beat.”

Kirsten – of the Kirsten & Dean comedy duo – is also Air Force (although she recently switched to the Navy), and was one of my early consultants – I sent her an early draft of the script, to see if she could help correct any of the glaring inaccuracies. I’m amused to note that she’s more distressed by what I’m wearing than by what I’m saying.

I’ve had a few veterans see the show by now, and for the most part they tend to either avoid me or take off immediately afterwards, which I’m not sure how to interpret. I’d be fascinated to hear what they make of this nonsense, despite the fact that what I’m doing is far from documentary – the Iraq of the story is a fantastic landscape, after all, having about as much to do with the real Iraq as say, Thomas Malory’s Britain had to do with the real island.

In any case, she expressed her desire to hit up an army surplus store and get me whipped into shape. We’ll see how that works out.

Star Trekkin’, Across the Universe…

Mike Shaeffer and I found ourselves stranded and without car. Fringe being what it is, we simply trusted fate to take us by the hand. A dude offered to give us a ride:

ME: What’s your name?

HIM: Kirk.

ME: Oh! Like the captain I’m sure that’s the first time you’ve ever heard that I’m so sorry.

HIM: Yeah. Let me just pull up my starship.

A few minutes later, a limo pulled up.

MIKE: (joking) Well, looks like our ride is here, guys!

(Kirk gets out.)

ME: Holy shit.

It turns out that the dude has a private limo that he just picked up on Craigslist. He’s been toying with the idea of throwing in some Guitar Hero 3 and turning it into a gamer-specific commercial vehicle. Or possibly fixing it up and selling it. But he may just hang onto it because it’s, y’know, a fucking limo.

ME: So are you from Kansas City?

HIM: Not originally, but I’ve lived here for a while now. I moved around a lot growing up – this is the first place that really felt like home.

ME: What do you like about it?

HIM: I don’t know. It’s a way more cosmopolitan city than most people think.

ME: Yeah. This is my second time here, and I feel like I’m seeing a completely different place.

And thus we spent the evening with Kirk, an Air Force brat turned rainforest explorer. He took us out to an Irish pub and regaled us with stories of avoiding deadfalls. It’s fascinating to see that there’s still people doing the Richard Francis Burton thing – traveling the world and accumulating bizarre experiences.

And then I find myself thinking, holy shit, am I one of those people? I don’t feel like it – I feel like an uptight small-town Midwestern boy. But it’s one thing that always baffled me about the success of Descendant of Dragons, when people expressed fascination with my experiences – wow, they didn’t feel magical at the time. How did I feel performing a pig sacrifice? Well, I was hot and sweaty and annoyed for the bulk of it. In retrospect it’s totally heady stuff (and yes, I’m working on some more autobiographical shows down the line, get off my tits), but at the time it’s just one more day in front of you.

Glanced up at the clock on our way out of the pub: after midnight, making it officially the twenty-first. Travel stories, a limo ride, and a pint of Guinness. I’ve had worse starts to a birthday.