The clothes are scattered round the apartment waiting to be stuffed back into suitcases, and I’ve been
making calls to confirm what time and where the Aircoach leaves from (and
pondering just grabbing a cab tomorrow at 6am).
We’re winding down and winding up, and I’ve got memories
jostling in my head for space, and new people I now know and mean to keep in touch with (some of
whom I actually will!) and tomorrow at this time, we’ll be high as a kite by
then (or around 30,000 feet).
It seems like we’ve packed 4 or 5 days’ worth of stuff into
the weekend.
On Friday, J. and I had a nice lunch at Avoca Café, where we
talked about our writing, and the plays we want to work on and how the hell an
artist can find the time, the place, the energy and the money. Of course, this
discussion was tempered with a beautiful piece of haddock, and some
fresh-brewed tea in a gorgeous café in Dublin where we’re doing my
play. So there was some perspective.
Then there were more errands to run, and postcards to buy,
and the fridge to stock again, and back to write out the postcards. Penmanship:
a lost art, brought back to life single-handedly (so to speak) on the backs of
several dozen pretty cards that are winging their way to America even as we
speak.
Friday was another two-show night, and I headed over to the
James Joyce Centre, which was our venue last year. Inside, the carpeted staircase and
walls decorated with old playbills and photos Joyce-related were like old
friends. I started chatting with a mother & daughter from the US as we
waited to get in; the daughter had just graduated from the University of North
Carolina (Chapel Hill), and said she’d majored in Ancient Studies because it
wasn’t likely she was going to get a job anyway for awhile at least, so she
might as well major in something she was interested in. I couldn’t disagree, and
told her I’d been an Ancient Studies major myself, and had had many careers.
The first show was “Brown & Out” from Los Angeles…a
series of short plays presented by Latino/a LGBTQ actors that contrasted
beautifully with the staid drawing room space at the Georgian home of the
Joyce. Latino work hasn’t turned up a lot in the festival (I got to see Moe
Pumo in David Bertran’s “Love Scenes” a few years ago, and Moe came back in
Chris Weikel’s “Pig Tale” the following year).
The short plays of Brown & Out ranged from in-your-face
satire, leading off with “The Foundation for a Better Gay Brown Life,” set in
the recent past, in which a representative of the Romney campaign is sent to
find a gay Latino to be a spokesperson…hijinks ensue. And the Republican comes
out in a burst of glitter.
Another winner was “A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving: the Untold
Story,” in which pretty much all of the Peanuts gang is gay (except Charlie
Brown, of course, and Sally who is Linus’s hag)…all of which was accomplished
pretty much by playing the subtext of the classic comic strip.
“The Gay Ghost Whisperer” was a clash of camp and drama that
shouldn’t have worked…but did, to great success, as the Ghost Whisperer and his
papi kept attempting to get down to it, but were interrupted by ghosts, usually
of gay men who’d killed themselves because their families had not accepted
them.
It was a sharp, talented group, and their energy and craft
was such that the audience got it…even with the cultural references they didn’t
know. Same thing happened with our play. An Irish/international crowd “got”
Purity, South Carolina, and identified with the characters, and took them in.
I stayed at the Joyce for the second show, which I’d been
looking forward to all week. I’ve long been a fan of the book “February House,”
by Sherill Tippins, the story of the house on Middagh Street in Brooklyn where
in the late ‘30s and early ‘40s, editor George Davis created a great gathering
of artists, many of them gay, living in a sort of creative boarding house. Carson
McCullers, W.H. Auden, Benjamin Britten
and Peter Pears, Gypsy Rose Lee (!) and a cast of many other artists, activists
and friends created an amazing melting pot of talent and ideas that’s a house I
would have loved to live in…that helped define its artistic era a bit like the Algonquin Round Table, with very different artists, but still the epicenter of great work and wit and fun.
I saw the musical version of “February House” last year at the Public Theater
in NYC, and fell in love with it all over again.
All this is by way of saying that when I heard there was a
play about Benjamin Britten, W.H. Auden and Peter Pears on for the final 2
nights of the first week, I knew I had to be there. And this was a play that
belonged perfectly in the drawing room. A tight, poetic, intense, emotional
chamber piece with Auden, Pears & Britten, and two of the women in their
lives: Britten’s sister Beth, and Beata, who was Pears & Britten’s landlord
when they lived on Long Island, far away from their country, already in a war. A
young, good cast showed the particulars of being in love with an artist, and
what artists can’t say to each other, even with their wealth of words. It’s
about as British as you can get (even with an American character), but I
suspect the people out there like me, who are in love with times & places
in the past, would come see it, wherever it is done.
Saturday was a bittersweet day, because it was the last one
where we’d be playing the show.
I went to see a rehearsal of Vickey Curtis’s piece, which she’s
opening Monday night in the short play series, and I gave her the kind of
feedback I thought would be useful to a person opening a show in 2 days (that
is, micro & focused, rather than stuff that can’t be fixed). It’s a good
piece, about two peoples’ relationship to their queer bodies…proving that “out”
is a longtime process, and sometimes the insides don’t match the outsides
without more work (both inside and outside).
Then I did my other business and mailed the final postcards,
and had a bit of the afternoon to myself, and I did what I like to do: I
wandered in a city not my own, and looked at things and let my feet go where
they’d take me.
After awhile, I went into a pub and had a beer and a beef
& Guinness pie with a huge pile of mashed potatoes and read my copy of
Joyce’s “Dubliners.” Cliché, yet satisfying.
I headed over to the Teacher’s Club to catch the first show,
a musical version of Oscar Wilde’s “The Happy Prince,” done by a family from
England. I’d enjoyed chatting with them through the week, and wondered what it
would be like to be in a show business family, where you might find yourself
touring to Edinborough and sharing the stage with a sister or parent. I love
that short story…it’s so beautiful. And the production was simple and clever
and drew attention to its narrative devices in a way that was Wildean.
It didn’t draw well, because, Brian thought, people couldn’t
grasp the concept of both “gay” and “children” in the same festival. So lots of
kids didn’t get to see a sweet show, and the adults who showed up did.
We’d had trouble drawing an audience as well. Every night
there were people; but not nearly as many as we would have liked. Each night I
asked myself: what can I do to sell this show? It’s not even a traditionally
gay show…but one that I like to think has an appeal to anyone who’s ever had to
leave someone they love behind. That covers a lot of folks.
Brian’s opinion is that the lesbian audience supports the
Irish plays/playwrights, or if there’s an Irish heroine involved (as in Carolyn
Gage’s “The Countess and the Lesbians.”) And we’ve always done well with the
short pieces, because they’re programmed with new Irish short plays, and they
tend to play to full houses.
One of these years I will crack the mystery and bring an
American play, written by a woman, to Ireland, and be able to sell it.
We had our best house of the run on Saturday; one of the
friends we met last year came, and brought a whole bunch of her friends, and
several other locals who knew/remembered us also came in, and one of the
volunteers told us he’d asked for our venue because he’d seen the show already,
but he really wanted to see it again.
And they played a beautiful show, and there was no time to
savor the moment, because the next show was due to start in a few minutes, and
we had to pack up the props and costumes and take the dish & glasses back
to the apartment, and get everything cleared up & away and boom. Out on the
street in 10 minutes with the vestiges of our show in a rolling suitcase. Short
sharp shock.
Then I went over to the box office to settle up with the
festival, and while I was waiting, grabbed a bite with Menno, who is becoming
one of my favorite people of this season, and we talked about spirituality and
computer apps. Then down to Pantibar, where there was time for a few shouted
words in ears, and hellos to the folks we’d met, and wish we’d met, and looking
for the ones we needed to say goodbye to (some of whom were already packing and
getting ready to leave).
They turned the lights up on us, and pulled down the shades
and it was last call. The party threatened to move on to The George, and we walked over there and I found it was LOUDER AND MORE CROWDED THAN A RUSH HOUR
SUBWAY and Danielle & J. I looked at each other and cabbed it back to the
apartment.
And we’re almost back to where we started. But I’m
exhausted. I want to write about the panels, and our last day (and evening,
which is upon us), but it may have to wait until tomorrow, when we head out to
the airport to check in THREE AND A HALF hours before our flight. Or maybe I’ll
compose the final entry in this year’s blog on the plane on the way home, and
post it when I’m back in Queens. Still one foot in the old country, one in the
new.
As always.
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