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

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

Michael Rice with the Cool as Hell Theatre podcast interviewed us last week and came up with this lovely little segment:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/TheCoolAsHellTheatrePodcast

He was really cool to talk to, smart, interested in a good story, stoked about theatre. Does anyone in Seattle do something like this? If not, somebody should start!

We also did a quick radio spot on KGO’s Wednesday cafe segment. They introduced us as “the doo-wop group, Medea Knows Best” and mispronounced Yana’s last name (it’s KesALLa, dudes! :-p) but the anchors were super nice. Woo, crazy, radio!

http://www.kgoam810.com/sectional.asp?id=18170#

…and then a review from the Contra Costa times. This guy didn’t like us as nearly as much as the Chronicle did, but for completeness’ sake, and so that we can all mock him together later, here’s the link:

http://www.contracostatimes.com/search/ci_8973447?IADID=Search-www.contracostatimes.com-www.contracostatimes.com

That’s all the journalists wrote for now! One SF weekend left, and then it’s back to the home turf…
xoxo
Alissa

Just came home from a great salsa night at Club Cocomo, around the corner from Antoun’s, where I’m staying. Everyone was dancing on 2, everyone was phenomenal; the floor was great, never too crowded, the atmosphere fun, the music awesome. I was totally outclassed, but didn’t feel ignored.

It’s late, Claytie’s sleeping, I have the smell of my dance partners’ colognes on my borrowed shirt. Antoun’s living room looks out over the city and the bay, and distant traffic lights are blinking at me here on the couch. I managed to pick up a case of poison oak on my face thanks to a lovely walk in the hills in Berkeley (so glad we finally found that carousel, Kirby… :-p ) Trying desperately not to scratch.

We have one weekend of performances left here in SF and then we run home, load in, tech, and do it all over again in Seattle. I LOVE this cast; their energy and enthusiasm is matched only by the sheer force of their talent. Seattleites, if you ever miss a show of mine, it shouldn’t be this one.

Post-salsa endorphins are telling me not to worry about the fact that I really am going to have to find a job when I return. Aside from that, the world is in place. Hopefully soon I’ll have some new pictures to put up; I wrote half a poem while lounging at the marina today that someday will poke its nose into these pages; stay tuned! Alissa is slowly replugging in to wired life! Don’t lose patience, faithful readers!

And etc. and etc. and on and on. Tomorrow I will do some businessy things and then go hang out with these people to watch a rehearsal for Beowulf: A thousand years of baggage. I’m excited about that because Dave makes good music and BB&B seems to make crazy work (even though I’ve never seen! Tragedy!) and now I get to peek at a little bit of how they do it! Yay.

Ramble ramble. Are you reading this? I like you. Perhaps now I will dream of you as I fall in to bed…right…now.

This is fun–our review made the front page of the SF Chronicle Datebook. Check it out!

Our review in the chronicle

Love!

devilishly,
Alissa

Madness madness, putting it all together in San Francisco and trying to make the show breathe. Our set is amazing. Our costumes are awesome. Our cast is extraordinary. The sound is making something of nothing. The lights are making our shifts make sense. There are plenty of moments still where as an actor I have no idea what I’m doing. I’m pleased with our last-minute rewrites and still sorting out how the ending comes together. We’re not in too much debt yet. Things are coming together. They’re coming. We have two days of rehearsal left until an audience sees a preview.

Eep!

I’m feeling very disorganized. Ever since we hit crunch time a few weeks ago, I’ve let so much personal stuff slide—I have an unpaid parking ticket from weeks ago; I haven’t followed up on the fact that I never got confirmation for filing my taxes; I have checks to deposit in my bank account and emails to write and my laptop desktop is a scrambled mess, and my car tabs need to be renewed, and and and and…
And there’s Nebunele business that’s on hold at the moment too; if you’ve donated recently and you haven’t got your Little Crazies welcome email or your T-shirt etc., it’s because that’s on my important-but-not-urgent list, the one I keep telling myself I’ll get to after we open.

I need a couple hours just to sit down and sort myself out. I’m not sure I’ll get it until, oh, the 13th. But it’s all going to be fine. I’m pretty sure.

San Francisco is lovely, EXIT is treating us very well and it’s so good to hang out with these guys again, and despite my feeling of being slightly out of control I’m also full of excitement and anticipation. So, scrambling. So, living. All of it will go on.

Crazy week from me to you! Come see the show if you’re in SF!
xoxo
Alissa

Didn’t get around to posting this yesterday morning, and last night I was writing this sitting on Dave (my excellent host)’s bed while he studied up about trombones and I tried to unwind from a good but sort of bewildering rehearsal. I think I need a new paragraph to talk about it.

I have this thing, sometimes, where as an actor if I get lost in a scene, and it’s a bit overwhelming to know what to do, and maybe I’ve also been putting in long days for a while and feeling like I’m not doing everything perfectly, where I get frustrated and a little emotional. A sort of fear comes in—that I won’t get it, that I’ll be lost in these scenes forever, that they are impenetrable to me and always will be. So I got a little teary in rehearsal yesterday, to the mild consternation of my director. But something I’ve learned about myself is that when that happens, I can use my own slight panic to make a shift in the scene I’m doing. I think it was Judy Shahn, my voice teacher at UW, who first had me work through my frustration-tears, and something about crying makes some (not all) of the blocks sort of go away. So I cried a little bit, and then I made a little progress. Last night, though, I was just feeling raw. I lost my grip on the play a little, and though I found some new stuff, I haven’t really got a handhold on it as a whole again. I’m beginning to maybe acknowledge that my bizarrely frenetic happiness and excitement that’s been bubbling up inside for the last week or so has a flip side that has probably been equally present despite my denial of it. My weird calm was masking a storm I don’t want to admit to myself.

Or maybe I just got tired. What a day. I love this work; this work wears me out like a hooker’s butt wears out her jeweled thong; I don’t get this work at all; this work teaches me more about myself than Mr. Miagi taught Daniel-San.

Here’s what I saw on the T-shirts they’re selling at Guerilla Coffee: “It’s job of the artist to make the revolution irresistible.”

Okay YES this is totally ridiculous. But my friend Jana wants, more than anything else in her whole life, to be on TV. She’s auditioning online for this reality TV show–who wants to be Paris Hilton’s bff? And apparently she’s in the top 20 girls for votes, which means she has a good shot at getting on the show. But she’s well behind the leaders at the moment.

If you have thirty seconds and a bit of compassion in your heart for a hometown girl who wants under the lights, take a moment, click this link, and vote for her! And, if you think of it tomorrow, vote again! You can vote once a day if you’re really excited for her. I am. She is…well, Jana is something else. I adore her and there’s no one quite like her and I want her to win. So.

http://parisbff.com/people/jsalamanca

Please vote.

Love!
Alissa

Hey, photos from our poker fundraiser on leap day are here:

http://picasaweb.google.com/foolissa/NebunelePokerNightFeb2908

It was a smashing success. Thank you everybody who helped make it happen, and those who came and made it fun!