Pip, pip, cheerio, all that rot.
Just received, via Royal Mail, somewhat definitive proof [1] that my writing has gone international–a program, from Vince Pham, for the production of 2 Plays, 5 Sketches . . . and a Goldfish that opened and closed last Monday and Tuesday in the Performing Arts Studio of the Trent Building–somewhere in England. (Honestly, I can’t remember the name of the university Vince was attending.)
The scope of the show was actually a surprise to me, as I had sent several scripts to Vince but had only heard him express an interest in Staring Contest. As it turns out, Vince actually world-premiered [2] not only this play, but four sketches that I’d never really expected to be performed in front of audiences. He also tossed in three untitled sketches [3] which his group (the aptly-titled “Two Brits, a Yank and a Scouser”) wrote, and had I known, I wuld have requested copies of these just to find out what else they’d done.
The set-list:
In Which It Is Determined the Exact Number of Literature Students Required to Change a Lightbulb
(untitled sketch 1.5)
Disconnect [4]
(untitled sketch 2)
The Great Saddam Search [5]
Page One of the Book of Old Tricks
Literary References for Social Situations, Lesson One [6]
Staring Contest, or The Enemy in Orange
(bonus sketch)
I can feel my head swelling, so I’m going to go soak it for awhile. Hee.
[1] Which is more than can be said for most dossiers coming out of Britain these days. Zing!
[2] My understanding is that you can’t call something a “premiere” unless it’s gone up on a professional stage. These guys charged a pound or two just to cover their expenses and did it in a studio, but I’ll be buggered if I’m going to call this anything less than a world premiere. Buggered, I say.
[3] Yeah, I don’t get how the math of the show’s title works either. Maybe it’s metric.
[4] This is the same play that was performed at last year’s Cut to the Chase [7], and I wonder how they pulled off the trick of the headless telemarketer. It was a hell of a problem for the last director, and she had a bit more support for the endeavor.
[5] This was the big shock to me . . . I didn’t actually send him this script, he pulled it off of the LJ entry. To be perfectly frank, I wasn’t sure it was ready to be performed at all, but hey, two Brits, a Yank, and a Scouser can’t all be wrong, I s’pose.
[6] This is a sketch I wrote in which I cannibalized a dialogue from another play of mine, about ways to survive cocktail conversation on James Joyce in general and Finnegan’s Wake in particular. They were nice enough to include excerpted text from Joyce’s incoherent opus in the program itself. My contention is that there are two types of people in the world–those who have never read Finnegan’s Wake, and liars.
[7] By the by, it appears that Dawn’s Lover will not be appearing in this year’s festival, which is fine, although it would be nice to see the play remounted now that it’s been revised (and wouldn’t be edited brutally for time constraints).
Current music: You Are Here; XTC, “Then She Appeared”
Creative Control 