Nebunele.com

Thanks, Miryam Gordon, for our friendliest Seattle review!

http://www.sgn.org/sgnnews36_20/page25.cfm

-A

Wow, so many posts all at once this week! Thanks, faithful readers, for weathering this deluge. But craziness! David Edwards, our actor who played Creon, let us know this morning that for health reasons he isn’t able to perform in the show this weekend. Yikes! Fortunately, our wonderful Creon from the last show, Mok Moser, has consented to step in last-minute, script in hand, so we needn’t cancel the show. Tonight I think it will be a donations-accepted kind of affair, since it will be essentially a rehearsal for him.

But for all you folks who commented after seeing the show that you missed Mok’s gleaming eyes and sparkly teeth, now’s your chance! Come see what this amazing man can do with just a few hours of last-minute rehearsal!

Oh, goodness, producing theatre is just moving from one emergency to the next, I begin to believe. What is that famous quote? Something about sliding into the grave sideways screaming “Whoo, what a ride!”

With adrenaline,
Alissa

Well. So our most-reviewed-ever show’s reviews are mostly out: to near-universal pans.

Charles Mudede of The Stranger says: “The writers went wrong in the final act—it has the heaviness of revealing a final and amazing truth, but its truth is not heavy or staggering. We already know that life in the suburbs is empty and soulless. Even people living in the suburbs know that. Medea Knows Best should never have pushed beyond the lightness of its music and comedy.”

Joe Adcock of the P-I says: “As has been pointed out time and time again by sociologists and satirists, songwriters and dramatists, the American Dream can be a stifling nightmare.
Nebunele recycles this well-worn insight. At times the playwrights seem to be implying that peace is boring and war is stimulating — not a welcome view at a time when war is deadening and peace is hardly imaginable. ” (Though he does give props to some of the “sharply caricatured performances.”)

Most damning of all is Seattle Times’s Misha Berson, who says: “And what a pity the neighborhood Greek chorus of domestic goddesses, harmonizing on renditions of pop oldies (”Catch a Falling Star,” “Chapel of Love”), can’t save Medea from adultery and mayhem — nor rescue this production by Seattle’s Nebunele Theatre from tedium….this is awfully well-trodden ground on stage and screen. And doggedly plowing it again, without turning up much that’s new, makes for a long and not terribly illuminating show.”

The sad thing about all this is that we never meant to say that 50’s suburbia is deadening. That was not our point, although three out of four Seattle reviewers seem to think it was. In fact, we wanted to highlight the opposite: that there is something real happening there, and that to deride this world all the way is to overlook the things about these choices that are beautiful and powerful. We wanted to *start* from that cultural assumption that all of this is meaningless, and then argue for these choices, give them a little weight; we wanted to say that faith in a perfect structure isn’t necessarily such a deadly thing, and that we do it as a people for a reason, even if maybe we sometimes don’t get it right.

But enough people are coming away with the opposite understanding that it’s clear: either we did a bad job of communicating what we wanted, or we underestimated the power of our audiences’ expectations. I think these reviewers saw the setup and extrapolated where we were going from everything else that’s in the American canon on this topic, and didn’t wait to see that we were actually trying to push it in the other direction. We were so careful not to seem to promote the aspects of that culture that *are* deadly, though, that I think we didn’t argue hard enough or long enough for the beauty we wanted to support. I don’t think any of these reviewers considered the very end of the play…and, were we to rewrite again, I think that would be highly valuable information. Our audience expects a certain argument, and we have to work much harder to subvert it.

Here’s the parade of gloom:

Seattle Weekly blurb (Not really more than summary, though it does mention the giant TV’s awesomeness):
http://seattleweekly.com/listings/theaters/433419

The Stranger:
http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/Event?event=561420

The PI:
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/theater/362766_theater13.html

The Seattle Times:
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/thearts/2004416680_medea16.html

So far no word from Miryam Gordon of TheatreMania and Seattle Gay News. Perhaps she has decided to spare us.

Oh, critics! Oh, plays!
Hoping that some people still come see the show,
Alissa

Communication

It struck me driving over the bridge toward home—
the lights of the city! The dark water!
Oh, how the clouds reflected all the hazy light pollution,
made me feel small and adventurous
and alone, and like if I spoke
to the city itself, it might reply.
I turned to my new love in the passenger’s seat
and tried: “I just got this feeling of…
of yearning.”
“Of what?”
“Yearning. Like a…like a longing for something. For a life
I don’t have. Or something.” I felt foolish.
“I know a cure for that!” he proclaimed.
“But I don’t want to be cured. I like this, this
lonely melancholy. Do you see?”
He didn’t. I tried again.
“You know when you’re hiking somewhere beautiful, alone?
That pretty loneliness you get?”
“I think I know what you mean. Being alone in nature.”
“Yes, but it’s a feeling of being just outside of a magic life.”
He looked at me blankly.
“I guess I’m not explaining it very well. I was just wondering if you ever feel that way.”
“Maybe you should write a poem,” he said.

It’s like that time when you were nine and you spoke to trees, thinking they were wiser than you, and patient. It’s like the first understanding that your parents’ wooden chessboard, that inert object, is older than you. It’s like that time you cried outside at night and the wind answered, tickling the back of your neck and the new hairs prickling out of your armpits. It’s like the first boy/girl party in seventh grade that went late into the night, and the music was loud and some people were holding each other for the first time, and it was dark and you didn’t belong. It’s being very human which means wanting something so badly it feels good just to want it, that satisfying hole, that nerve-wracking hunger. I am, therefore I need. Something. It’s just like being alive. Like that time you were alive.

-Alissa

I’d like to take a moment right here and talk about how freaking amazing my mother is. If you know her, you will understand why I say that while of course everybody’s mom is special, I am somebody who has seriously lucked out in the mother department.

So, a year ago, partially inspired by the Artist’s Way, I quit my lucrative day-job to run my theatre company and make some plays with uninterrupted focus. I decided to live on my savings account for as long as I could in order to complete the two-part project of Medea Knows Best, apply for our 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status (which we are shortly being awarded! Whee!) and start building the infrastructure for a company that more and more I am beginning to regard as my life’s work.

Did my mom freak out at my abandoning a stable income for an artistic dream that makes me approximately $0 annually, at 27 years old? No. She got excited for me, told all her friends how proud of me she was, donated money to Nebunele, and traveled to San Francisco with my dad (who helped build the set) to see the finished product.

This month, I decided to leave my cute little studio apartment on Capitol Hill to move into a beautiful big house, farther out of the city center, with partner-in-crime Claytie. We needed a third roommate to make the house affordable, and for a time were considering a good friend of ours who also happens to be an ex-boyfriend of mine. When I told my mom about that, she let me know that she thought it was a bad idea, as that would have the potential to create emotional storms that could wreck my relationship with him and make my living situation difficult. In the next breath in that conversation, though, she told me that if the landlord of the house was dubious about renting to me because I am currently unemployed, she would be happy to co-sign with me on the lease.

EVEN WHEN SHE DISAPPROVES, my mom supports my choices! She’s honest with me about how she disagrees, and then goes right on doing everything she can to help me out and make them happen. Such a generous, loving mom is straight out of a storybook, and in so many ways, I cannot even believe that I am so lucky.

I can talk to my mom about everything—my fears, my pride, my love life, my mistakes. I have been raised with an unshakeable faith in her love for me. My parents’ home is open to me any time—and not just to me, but to my friends, who tell me after they visit my parents that they feel they have been welcomed home. When I floated the idea of someday developing a show on their beautiful and secluded 5 acres in Trinidad, they didn’t even blink at the notion of hosting a bunch of actors and theatre technicians for months. My mom over the course of my life has helped me develop a strong sense of self; an independence that can only come from knowing that if I need it, I will always be taken care of; the belief that I am attractive and intelligent and capable of whatever I put my mind to. I could not be who I am today, doing the crazy things that I do, if it weren’t for the support, applause, love and validation that I have gotten all my life from my mother whenever I needed it, and often even when I didn’t.

Not only does she support me in a hundred thousand ways, she also happens to be intellectually brilliant, beautiful, an amazing musician, an admirably straightforward communicator, intuitive and compassionate, accepting, inquisitive, generous, and creative. I’ve spent much of my life looking up to her, learning from her, and emulating her. To be blessed with a truly admirable person as the woman who raised me feels like extra, like oh-my-gosh-what-wonderful-thing-did-I-do-in-a-past-life-to-deserve-this, like even more than I am entitled to as a human being growing up in this crazy world. If I stray into sappiness, forgive me. My mom deserves sappy. My mom rocks.

Thanks, Mom! I love you!
xoxo
Alissa

Well, it looks like our personal pestering of reviewers has finally paid off! The PI and Seattle Gay News reviewers were in our audience last night, the Stranger is coming tonight, and the Times and the Seattle Weekly are coming on Saturday! 5 papers, holy crap! I’ve never had five reviews for one show in a single city in my whole life.

Anyway, no reviews are out yet, but we got a nice advance mention in today’s Seattle Times (Thanks, Sean, for spotting it!): http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/thearts/2004401326_dram09.html

More coming shortly!
xoxo
Alissa