And You May Ask Yourself: How Did I Get Here?

Sunday, May 13 was our tech rehearsal. And even before then, I had lots to do: check out (regretfully) of the lovely Merrion, grab a cab to Jurys Christchurch. As always, I chatted with the cab driver who began to ask rather pointed questions about the play. When we got there, he tucked the card into his pocket and said: maybe I’ll have a look-in, I’m bisexual. (I refrained from saying: Good for you! After all, there are some who say that bisexuals, like leprechauns don’t exist).

To the sound of church bells pealing, I unpacked in my room across from Christchurch Cathedral, and dressed for the panel on gay theatre (there is a fine line between serious theater person and slob). Then headed toward Temple Bar, with dead computer, aka craptop, aka Important Prop and xylophone aka sound effect, in my bag.

View from my hotel window.

I went to find the venue, the Exchange Cultural Center, which like many places in Dublin has no numbered street address. On my way, I stopped at Tesco and bought a burner phone (the definition of which according to UrbanDictionary.com is: “A prepaid cellular phone, replaced frequently (weekly) (monthly) to avoid leaving a trail and getting caught up in illegal activities.”)

As if calling your mother on Mother’s Day is an illegal activity!

And I found the venue good and early (always my first order of business when I’m on a panel or going to a show in a new place), and then sat down to make the phone work. Couldn’t figure out what the PIN was…couldn’t call to ask them…when I came back to the venue, Callum, the producing director of the festival, pointed out that the PIN was on the bottom of the box. This is why he’s running the festival.

So we paneled on “whither gay theatre/er” as we are wont to do in gay theater/re. The other panelists were me, Callum, playwright Lisa Saleh (who has a piece in the shorts), and a guy whose name completely escapes me who had by far the most credentials and gave the actual Aiden Clarke Memorial Lecture on Gay Theatre before we opened it up to questions.

Gareth Hurley moderated the panel; he’s been with the festival practically since its inception, and has been taking on additional duties with artistic director Brian Merriman out of action due to a family emergency. So we discussed the usual intangibles and problems that will never be solved: Is gay/queer theater something that still needs to exist apart from the mainstream (I say, yes); is the mainstream a place for plays that have predominantly gay content or themes (yes); and can straight playwrights write gay plays (yes again). I’ve been on many panels over the years; on all kinds of topics, and I can hold my end up with stories, quotes, pithy rejoinders and anecdotes.

So we passed a pleasant 90 minutes or so on a street that turned out to be a lot busier than it looked…people passed by and banged on the windows. Two little kids wandered in and out of the room, and loudly chatted with each other, and of course when it finally got to be the audience’s turn to ask questions, there were a few people who confused “question” with “statement of my own beliefs.”

And then it was over to the Joyce for the tech rehearsal, already in progress. I took a cab and the driver knew pretty much where it was…but not exactly. And heading up Great George St., he pulled over and asked a lady if she knew, and she pointed back down the street and said: next to the for sale sign. And the driver did a u-turn and went the wrong way own a one-way street, but nobody was coming towards us.

And I got there, and brought the all-important xylophone into the controlled mayhem that is a tech rehearsal. The room I thought, was lovely. And one of the most acoustically “bouncy” I’ve ever been in. Every word, every step, every movement seemed to reverberate off all the surfaces simultaneously and come back and echo itself a few times. It’s a beautiful room: wide wood-paneled floors, huge windows with wooden shutters, pocket doors to the next room, and a lovely ceiling painted a kind of peach/orange with white moldings of classical freizes. Gorgeous and LOUD.

With the shutters open, the outside light was lovely, and it gave the room the feel of being lit by Vermeer. Shutters closed, they worked 'neath artificial lighting.

Jen sat at the back with our lighting guy, and two stands of stage lights had been erected on either side of the room. At the far end, the playing area had a piano, two tables and two chairs. That was our set. And one Mr. James Joyce glaring down from a portrait to the right of the fireplace. 

What Would JJ (James Joyce) Do?

Watching the actors take possession of the room and tame it and fit their craft to the structure was to see what actors really do. They rasied and lowered their voices walked on their heels and their toes, turned and spoke with their faces at different angles, bouncing the sound off the walls like an outfielder taking a carom and turning to throw home.

Rows of chairs awaited an audience; the next room quickly became a prop/dressing room, and the chill of the late Dublin spring seeped in. Books…most of them by or about Joyce were piled on a table, and carefully put into a corner to wait for their eventual restoration. Ulysses, Ulysses, Ulysses…

In the hallway, on the staircase, were reproductions of theatrical posters, and another bookcase filled with translations of Joyce’s works. There’s another staircase to a third floor…which I haven’t yet taken. On the first floor landing, there’s a statue of Narcissus, light streaming over him from the tall, arched window.

Himself also watched from backstage.

The actors ran and worked, Mark called out changes and gave direction about their voices and movements, and where to put props, and who should strike them. And I began to wonder if it was all going to fall into place. Had we bitten off more than we could chew when I blithely sent in the application back in December? Did I really think we could create a new piece of theatre in the time and space allotted to us by the boundaries of dayjobs and daily living and picking through the emotional and financial minefield of the start of the second decade of the 21^st century? This is how I am during tech.

Then suddenly it was time to go and we’d had close to a runthrough, but not really. And everyone was ravenous, but Mark had to go across the river to the Speakeasy to do ANOTHER tech, this one for Michael Lynch’s show, “Livin’ on the Real.” And Jen went to finish up her first week, by moving out of the apartment she’d shared with Andrea Alton, over to the apartment she’d be sharing with the “Outlook” cast. And we told her we’d email her when we decided where to eat.

I said: I know a place. And we headed for a restaurant at the far end of Temple Bar, just a few minutes across the river on foot.

We were joined by Shalema, Donnetta’s wife, who’d arrived that day and had the dazed look we’d all had the day before. We wended our way to The Larder, a restaurant where Chris Weikel and I shared a memorable meal back in ’09, and which I suggested our authors put into the Ireland book (they agreed), and it’s still there when a lot of other places are gone, and the restaurant said they had room for us, and we told them we’d be there by 7.

Chris Weikel deciding to take his MFA.

The night Chris and I ate there, we talked about what we wanted to do with our work; Chris was there with "Pig Tale" and thought he might apply to the Hunter program for his MFA; I was there with "The Adventures of..." and I had the first draft of a play called “Outlook.” I went to see Chris’s thesis play for his MFA at Hunter last week. And I’m here with “Outlook.”

So there’s an emotional resonance there. Which is good for the appetite. We fell to with great relish and all but ate the plates beneath the beautifully prepared food set before us. Then we looked in at the Front Lounge, across the street from The Larder, where we dropped off more postcards (I don’t want to take ANY postcards home), and then the cast wended their way back across the river, and I went back up the street to Jurys Christchurch, where I stayed up too late. Because even though I’m tired, I don’t want to miss a minute. I’m not sure of what, but I just don’t. The air is different here, and the light, and when I am walking along the streets of a city not my own, and looking out onto landscapes that aren’t the ones I see every day, I feel as though I must make the most of it, and eventually the saner part of me talks me into getting into bed and pulling the covers over my head and sleeping…for a bit. Because there is the wake-up call coming, and the full Irish breakfast, which holds you for…several hours, if not days, and the hotel hopping to the next place, which is why I can’t do morning activities, and the phone calls home (since I finally got the phone to work) and shut down, mind. Why is there no “Sleep” button, as there is on my computer?

And go to sleep and try to remember dreams, or not, if they’re bad, and wonder at the tunes running through your head, and maybe have the TV on for a little just to hear the voices. Think about getting up early…know that I won’t. Tomorrow is opening. Tomorrow we find out what we have (or not), and tomorrow is, as Scarlett said, another day.