Sunday, May 12, 2013

After the dancers' leaving, after the stars are gone...

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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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