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Jan. 29th, 2006 02:16 amToday I found out that my gf is apparently a princess, a bandit princess, or something. No, really.
God, I'm tired. And she's wicked besides.
God, I'm tired. And she's wicked besides.
Jan. 29th, 2006
Dogboy & Justine
A not-quite romantic dramedy about sex workers and head injury
written and directed by Racheline Maltese
featuring:
Susie Abraham
Jessica Bathurst
Rani Karnik
Edie Nugent
and the voices of Susan Shay and Danny Pitt Stoller
Stage Manager: Susan Shay
Performing in Series F of The Strawberry One-Act Festival, February 5th and 6th at 9pm at The Producers Club II, 616 Ninth Avenue (bet. 43rd & 44th St.)
The Strawberry One-Act Festival is a competition. Your vote will keep the show on stage and help it move to the semi-finals and finals.
Tickets available at:
http://www.therianttheatre.com/cgi-bin/shop.pl/page=tickets.html#strawberry
Tickets for the initial performances are $15 and include Dogboy & Justine as well as the three other plays in Series F.
A not-quite romantic dramedy about sex workers and head injury
written and directed by Racheline Maltese
featuring:
Susie Abraham
Jessica Bathurst
Rani Karnik
Edie Nugent
and the voices of Susan Shay and Danny Pitt Stoller
Stage Manager: Susan Shay
Performing in Series F of The Strawberry One-Act Festival, February 5th and 6th at 9pm at The Producers Club II, 616 Ninth Avenue (bet. 43rd & 44th St.)
The Strawberry One-Act Festival is a competition. Your vote will keep the show on stage and help it move to the semi-finals and finals.
Tickets available at:
http://www.therianttheatre.com/cgi-bin/shop.pl/page=tickets.html#strawberry
Tickets for the initial performances are $15 and include Dogboy & Justine as well as the three other plays in Series F.
quasi-wanky HDM radio play analysis
Jan. 29th, 2006 11:47 pmThe BBC radio play of His Dark Materials is so lovely. In many ways it suffers, as all instances of the genre must, from the conventions of the genre -- the very short musical themes that help you understand what's going on (these are rarely good in any radio play, and frequently awful in this one as in all), and from an amazing amount of telling rather than showing -- especially in a radio play of a fantasy novel where you need to know how things look, and since it's all audio all you can do is have people exclaim really obvious crap.
The device to use Balthamos as a "recording angel" is terribly clever, although unfortunately requires that we lose three of the most fun pages of the book -- where he's a sulky little queen. A recording angel must be both more heroic and more impassive than the Balthamos of the novel, which is unfortunate, as his herroism is shown to us in his irritability, transformation and grief.
We also lose many moments of utter wrenching sadness that the book provides -- most notably Tony Makarios and his fish, and other moments, agonizing in text, happen far more efficiently and as such are far less painful -- e.g., Pan's abandonment on the shore in the Suburbs of the Dead.
What we get instead though is voice and interpretation, and so in characters who are written so intensely without regret, the actors provide what I think Pullman hints at in the text but never allows time in the narrative for (most notably, action always occurs that allows Lord Asriel to stride out of a room as he's about to express any sort of sentiment of regret or domesticity (and really, how else is regret represented in art?)). The ultimate result of this, aside from further highlighting the fact that Pullman, were he not so ambitious, would have been a spectacular writer of truly traditional romance novels (because truly, could Marissa swoon in the arms of the big strong man anymore? It's really very funny), is that His Dark Materials becomes overtly (as opposed to by inferrence) the story of two sets of growings up -- Lyra & Will's and Asriel & Marissa's, each bittersweet for terribly different reasons -- the children, because of all the losses that come with first loves and the adults because of all the losses that they have never acknowledged and now must hold, accept and finally ignore in the name of duty all at once. Ultimately, they are the ones who are more unprepared for what the world brings them, even as they have engineered these results so much more consciously. And so in the radio play, they become far more human characters while also far more powerful ones.
For all Pullman tells us that Lyra is Eve, HDM's secret really is that everyone is Lucifer sometimes. And so oddly, what the book, especially in radio play form, celebrates, isn't growing up as a finite walling off of childhood (although this too is inescapable in fact and the author's message), but the ebb and flow of a teenaged sort of troubled genius, with adulthood being the ability to allow it into your life, while also being prepared for, and capable of, managing the often startling consequences of the self-innovation that comes with a successful adolescence.
As someone hellbent on her own version of adulthood (and largely, but not entirely, at peace with the ramifications of her parents' narcicism), I found the whispered moments of performance that bring us this both deeply moving and unsettling, even buried as they often are in the high camp of the genre.
The device to use Balthamos as a "recording angel" is terribly clever, although unfortunately requires that we lose three of the most fun pages of the book -- where he's a sulky little queen. A recording angel must be both more heroic and more impassive than the Balthamos of the novel, which is unfortunate, as his herroism is shown to us in his irritability, transformation and grief.
We also lose many moments of utter wrenching sadness that the book provides -- most notably Tony Makarios and his fish, and other moments, agonizing in text, happen far more efficiently and as such are far less painful -- e.g., Pan's abandonment on the shore in the Suburbs of the Dead.
What we get instead though is voice and interpretation, and so in characters who are written so intensely without regret, the actors provide what I think Pullman hints at in the text but never allows time in the narrative for (most notably, action always occurs that allows Lord Asriel to stride out of a room as he's about to express any sort of sentiment of regret or domesticity (and really, how else is regret represented in art?)). The ultimate result of this, aside from further highlighting the fact that Pullman, were he not so ambitious, would have been a spectacular writer of truly traditional romance novels (because truly, could Marissa swoon in the arms of the big strong man anymore? It's really very funny), is that His Dark Materials becomes overtly (as opposed to by inferrence) the story of two sets of growings up -- Lyra & Will's and Asriel & Marissa's, each bittersweet for terribly different reasons -- the children, because of all the losses that come with first loves and the adults because of all the losses that they have never acknowledged and now must hold, accept and finally ignore in the name of duty all at once. Ultimately, they are the ones who are more unprepared for what the world brings them, even as they have engineered these results so much more consciously. And so in the radio play, they become far more human characters while also far more powerful ones.
For all Pullman tells us that Lyra is Eve, HDM's secret really is that everyone is Lucifer sometimes. And so oddly, what the book, especially in radio play form, celebrates, isn't growing up as a finite walling off of childhood (although this too is inescapable in fact and the author's message), but the ebb and flow of a teenaged sort of troubled genius, with adulthood being the ability to allow it into your life, while also being prepared for, and capable of, managing the often startling consequences of the self-innovation that comes with a successful adolescence.
As someone hellbent on her own version of adulthood (and largely, but not entirely, at peace with the ramifications of her parents' narcicism), I found the whispered moments of performance that bring us this both deeply moving and unsettling, even buried as they often are in the high camp of the genre.