HERE, THERE & ELSEWHERE Eps 48

My latest column in BLink, TOASTER ALARM

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HERE, THERE & ELSEWHERE ... Episodes #47, #46, #45

My latest column in BLink,
Episode #47: TWILIGHT ZONE

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My column in BLink Episode #46,
PARTY, PARTY






















My column in BLink, Episode #45
MEATY TREATS:

HERE, THERE & ELSEWHERE, Episode #44

My latest column in BLink:
Manly Truths

HERE, THERE & ELSEWHERE Eps # 43

My latest column in BLink:
TRANSIT WORLDS

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FULL ARCHIVE

HERE, THERE & ELSEWHERE: Eps #42

My most recent column in BLink: MAGIC COOKIES.

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HERE, THERE & ELSEWHERE -- NEW EPISODES! Four of 'em.

Yes. It happened again. Falling off the schedule. I could complain about the endless parade of deadlines I've had to battle but I know there are no sympathizers out there. None. *sigh* Ah well!

Best get on with it then!!

As before, these will appear in reverse order, with the most recent one at the top.

Eps # 41: OCTOBER 31st

Eps#40: October 24th

Eps#39: October 17th

Eps#38: October 10th

HTE Eps # 37

My latest column in BLink: GOAT NIGHT

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FULL ARCHIVE

HTE Episodes #36, #35, #34, #33, #32, #31 (yes, in reverse order)

This is a whole bunch (six) of my recent columns in BLink ... coz I've been traveling and it's too much of a struggle to upload the links on my iPad. They're in reverse sequence because ... yes, I know you all know that time runs back to front, right? The most recent second is at the top of the column of all the seconds in our lives aaaaand ... umm ... anyway. Whatever. Here are the columns, starting with the most recent one.

BEAR NECESSITIES

COW QUEST

LAST BLAST

SCENTED SEANCE

PAINFUL PLEASURES

SPEED PUNK

Second EXTRACT from THE ISLAND OF LOST GIRLS

This extract is from SCROLL IN.

EXTRACT ... from THE ISLAND OF LOST GIRLS

An extract from my new novel, THE ISLAND OF LOST GIRLS was published in BLink today, as part of their Independence Day special. Here's a link to it: EXTRACT.

HERE, THERE & ELSEWHERE: Eps # 30

My latest column in BLink:
TAIL TALES

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FULL ARCHIVE

HERE, THERE & ELSEWHERE: Eps #29

My latest column in BLink:
SATANIC SCENTS

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HERE, THERE & ELSEWHERE, Eps # 28

My latest column in BLink:
Flame Wars

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HERE, THERE & ELSEWHERE: Eps # 27

My latest column in BLink:
LADIES' BRUNCH

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HERE, THERE & ELSEWHERE Eps # 26

My latest column in BLink:
RENT-A-CORPSE

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HERE, THERE & ELSEWHERE, Eps # 25

This is my most recent column in BLink:
GRILLED STARS

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HERE, THERE & ELSEWHERE: Eps 24

My latest column in BLink:
Coffin Chic

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HERE, THERE & ELSEWHERE: Eps #23

My most recent column in BLink, Business Line's Saturday Magazine:
Forbidden Love.

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HERE, THERE & ELSEWHERE: Eps # 22

My most recent column in BLink, Business Line's Saturday Magazine:
LADDOO LADY

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HERE, THERE & ELSEWHERE: Eps # 21

My recent column in The Hindu Business Line's Saturday Magazine, BLink:
GUEST REQUEST

HERE, THERE & ELSEWHERE: Eps # 20

My recent column in The Hindu Business Line's Saturday magazine BLink:
FOOD WARS!

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HERE, THERE & ELSEWHERE: Eps # 19

My recent column in the Hindu Business Line's Saturday Magazine, BLink:
Vegetarian Blues

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HERE, THERE & ELSEWHERE: Eps # 18

My recent column in the Hindu Business Line's Saturday Magazine BLink:

KOOKIE KITTY

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FULL ARCHIVE

HERE, THERE & ELSEWHERE: Eps # 17

The current episode of my column in BLink, the Hindu Business Line's Saturday Magazine:
Kookie Monster

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HERE, THERE & ELSEWHERE, Eps# 16, May 9th

The current episode of my column in BLink, Business Line's Saturday magazine:
Kookie Capers.

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HERE, THERE & ELSEWHERE, Eps # 15

The current episode of my column in BLink:
TRASH BANDIT

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HERE, THERE & ELSEWHERE, Eps #14

This is the latest episode of my column HERE, THERE & ELSEWHERE,  in BLink:
FIRE ESCAPE

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HERE, THERE & ELSEWHERE: Eps #13

Trio Troubles

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HERE, THERE & ELSEWHERE Eps #12

Tip-Tap Troubles

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HERE, THERE & ELSEWHERE, Episode #11

Minx Mania

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Seven Day Recap, starting with Monday March 30th.

Monday, March 30rd, Shirley A. Huston-Findley’s play-writing class.

I gave a talk about writing play scripts and being a playwright. Several of the students in the class had attended the Lights Out reading and a couple had participated in it. So it was an easy matter to describe the “process” for LO — especially since the play is/was based on a description given to me by a friend who was an eye-witness to the incident, circa 1983. I wrote the play in ’84 but I can still hear my friend’s voice, telling me about what she had seen. There were some good questions after the talk.

Tuesday, March 31st, Devised Performance session.

So this was the third of six sessions and the second one dedicated to the New Play. I’d had the weekend and Monday to work on new scenes for this script. Somewhat to my surprise I found that my characters, who have been stuck in limbo for about ten years now, were still able to move and speak. But not a whole lot: the script is sort of about language and origins, so in the opening scenes it’s something of a challenge to get any kind of intelligible speech out of them (the characters)! Shirley’s students were, however, very accepting of what was put before them. Even though I had given them no idea whatsoever about what lay ahead in the play, they read their lines with dignity and engagement. All in all, it was a very good session.

Thursday, Apr 2nd, Devised Performance session.

Now, finally, there’s a little more meat on the bone (of the script). I worked all of Wednesday and there are now three completely new scenes. The characters have a lot more conversation. Rather than read sitting down, Shirley asked her students to move around, holding the scripts. This gave them more to do and was perhaps more fun for them. Seeing them moving was also very useful for me. The characters definitely came alive in a more rounded way. I’ve not just been adding lines at the end, but continuously up-dating the earlier scenes as I’ve gone along. So the situation (in the play) is evolving in several directions at once.

After our session I also had a chat with three of the students about their prior experiences with improvising and workshopping scripts as a group. As I am entirely unused to collaborating with other people, it was interesting to me. What I’m doing isn’t really the same (because I’m still the only person writing the script), except in the sense that the script is taking shape via the interaction. If I were here for longer, we may have been able to explore each character’s back-story and that would undoubtedly have fed back into the final result. Still, as I write new scenes, I can see tendrils of all the conversations and stray remarks that we’ve had so far, peeking in and out of the dialogue in the play.

Friday, Apr 3rd, Two Talks.

The first was in Prof Dale Seed’s Green Theatre class. Green Theatre involves, as its name suggests, applying ideas of sustainability and eco-awareness to the practice of theatre. The students had been set the task of reading HARVEST and Dale’s reason for wanting to include it in his class was that the play is built around a potentially disastrous and inhumane global trade. I shared my three favorite Harvest stories — how I happened to think of the play (on a visit to Madras, seeing patients in a clinic near my parents’ home, recovering from kidney transplant surgery), what someone said at one of the meetings I was invited to (a cynical but realistic older lady, covered in diamonds, stood up and said, “This is all very well, but if anyone of us needs a transplant, we’re just going to get one in the usual way.”) and finally, the story told to me by a friend of how she found herself caught up in a very Harvest-like situation, including having to fatten up the potential donor, when her desperately sick aunt needed a kidney transplant. Eventually, though, the aunt recovered without surgery! So there was a kind of happy ending there.

In the evening I gave a talk with slides on the subject of Cultural Hybridity and the Artist. It sounds rather grand and obscure, but really it was just me carrying on about being an artist/writer who grew up in different cultures, feeling equally rooted and rootless wherever I go. The signs of this hybridity are especially obvious in my artwork, which was why I used my slide-show (some years ago I put together a bunch of images that I can  use for purposes such as this talk. I vary the content based on what I’m asked to talk about), IN TRANSIT. The two pictures I’ve posted here are of the introductory image. The one the screen at the venue looks a bit faded; the other one is a jpeg of the same image. The audience was small, composed mostly of Shirley’s students and a couple of other interested (and interesting) people from the college, so the discussion that followed was quite lively and broad-ranging.

And after that, I came back to my charming home-stay apartment and spent three days immersed in writing the next few scenes of this suddenly-almost-complete New Play! It’s such a surprise to me to see how much it has evolved from the handful of pages (literally, like maybe 10. Now I have three times that amount — but it’s not the quantity, it’s the content that surprises me) I started with. 

That’s all for today. Tomorrow is my second last session. On Thursday is the last and then on Friday – we’ve all agreed to this – the students will participate in an informal reading, to a small audience of fellow students, of however much of the play I’ll have finished by then. 

In Wooster, OHIO

MARCH 22nd

I am currently in Wooster, OHIO, staying in this very charming home-stay (here's a link: THE LILY PAD), as the guest of the Department of Theatre and Dance in The College of Wooster. I'll be here for three weeks, conducting a theatre workshop -- a Devised Performance Workshop is what we're calling it -- built around two (and possible three), of my plays. Two of them are finished but I've always wanted to hear them and work on them a bit before publishing and the third is just a fragment, unwritten for all practical purposes.

Helping me in this process are the students of SHIRLEY A. HUSTON-FINDLEY, perhaps ten of them (I'll know for sure only later today). While I'm here we're hoping to do a rehearsed reading of LIGHTS OUT, with a small audience and I will give a couple of other talks too.

I plan to report about these events as I go along, so ... please expect regular updates! I'll try to keep them brief, but I may also blog about them, in which case they'll be longer descriptions.

Wooster, OHIO, March 24th & 25th:

Two very good days.

TUESDAY, 24th March

Our plan (Shirley's and mine) was to do a read-through of one of my existing plays, THE MATING GAME SHOW. A small number of you here at FB -- Gulan in particular! And also Divya Seth Shah -- will remember it from various failed attempts to get it produced in India in the late 80s. Since those days, it's had an erratic career. I've re-written it so often that after the 16th time I decided to stop counting. My aim was always to shorten it from it's original 3- or 3.5-hour length to something reasonable, given the typical budget of Indian Amateur theatre -- but it remained stubbornly un-doable even though (or so it seemed to me. Maybe everyone was lying?) there was always an initial interest in it because of the potentially "exciting" form.

Then there was Govind Nihalani's filmed version for TV -- remember BiTV? -- MGS was one of the shows that was slated for broadcast. But it was all hot air and though most of the 22-odd (I forget whether it was meant to be 22 or 25) episodes were filmed, the whole thing was canned. I typed all of it (on paper!), sitting in Delhi, and sending the pages by courier (no internet!) to Bombay, while the filming was on. Immense pressure. But kind of fun. In a reckless, swimming-away-from-sharks sort of way. No-one got any money out of it whatsoever, including of course, the poor actors.

It was only after that that I decided to pare it right down to the current version, in which there are only 6 contestants and the whole play lasts maybe an hour and a half. I attended a reading in New York (maybe in 2004?) organized by Geeta Citygirl at Salaam Theatre, directed by Paul Knox. He did a great job and I remember the performance was well-received. But in all this time, I always felt there was something left to do with the script.

So.

Here in Wooster, with a group of ten of Shirley's students, five men, five women, we had a run through of the whole play and ... I think it went very well ... and I also think I need to pretty much re-write the whole thing. *grin* Okay, not the WHOLE thing. But keeping the characters and the situation, return to the original Game Show structure. I don't know if there's time to do that during this trip ...

WEDNESDAY, 25th March

Shirley had asked a smaller group of her students, seven this time, to meet in the evening for one of two reading rehearsals for LIGHTS OUT. It is due to be performed (as a reading) on Friday, in front of a small audience at the Shoolroy Theatre, on campus (I will eventually get around to posting a picture of the poster). It's been a very long time since I read/watched a performance of LO -- despite the fact that Katherine Lieder in Madison, WN staged performances last year (? Hmm. May have been 2013) and tried to set up a video session for me but it didn't work out time-wise -- so this was my first return to the play after many years. I had forgotten how very disturbing it is. Brrr. The students did very well. I am hoping to ask permission to post pix -- and also to take a few! -- and if either Shirley or I succeed, I'll hope to post some here very soon.

March 26th and 27th:

It's getting to be quite a task to keep up with events here. The past two days have been kind of packed. In a good way.

March 26th:

There were two events today. The first was in the afternoon, with Shirley's class of ten participating students, in the development of a new play that I hope to write in the course of my stay here. Let me hasten to add, it's unlikely that I will actually FINISH writing it. What I said to Shirley when we were planning the events of my stay, was that I had a fragment of a play, something I had begun writing perhaps ten years ago. I can't be sure whether or not the idea has legs on it. But I'd like to try. So ... that's what her students are helping me with: to see whether or not there's a valid idea there or not.

Those of you who know me will be aware that I'm not at all used to working alongside anyone else! So far, I have only ever written in complete isolation. That's quite normal with novels and short stories but ... plays? Well, let's just say it's unusual. I have often wanted to engage with a group of actors, but so far -- until Wooster -- I have been unsuccessful. What has happened so far is that I finish writing my piece and then I leave it with actors/director. At most, I have some interaction (and DISAGREEMENTS, haha) with the choices made in production. With the Mating Game Show, I had several bouts of writing and re-writing the play after each interaction. But I've never written something WHILE interacting with actors.

The play is well-suited to being worked on because (a) I've only got the first few pages of the script, with only the barest minimum of an idea fleshed out. In fact it's too early even to discuss its title: for the purposes of FB I'm going to call it "New Play". All I can say to the students, aside from sharing the few pages of the script, is that I know where I want it to go but I can't offer a map for getting there. That's what we're going to work on. (b) I had always wanted to write something looser and more flexible than my typical script (normally, I have to be prevented from describing every twitching nostril and raised eyebrow ...).

What the students did on Thursday was to read the few pages of script and then improvise based on what they'd read. Shirley had them form into three groups (of three each, with the tenth person interacting with each of the groups during their improv) and improvise based on the very sketchy information they had. I enjoyed the session tremendously and the students threw themselves into it with gusto. Still, at the end of the time (an hour and 45) I know only that I didn't feel much confidence in my script in its current form. At this moment, it's like a very thin mattress with lots of springs poking out. Not comfortable to land on. All I can say right now is that from the start, I could only see a small flicker of life in the idea and I can still see it. It's very faint though. I have a lot of work to do! (I haven't named any students yet because I'd like to ask their permission before doing that).

EVENING SESSION:

Another rehearsal, the final one, of the LIGHTS OUT reading. At our previous session, we didn't have time to get to the final scene of the play, so this time we started with it. Anyone who has seen LO will know that it's unnerving to sit through. No difference here. Everyone did very well. Shirley took the part of one of the characters and the lady screamer (who remains out of sight if/when the performance is staged) outdid herself. I went home thinking that I really must try and write something less gut-wrenching one of these days.

March 27th:

... and the reading went very well. There was a small audience of maybe 20 people and Shirley's young actors (including Shirley herself) read with dignity and passion. One decision we made at the outset was to re-locate the events of the play to the US. This may seem an odd decision, but it was an idea I borrowed from a young student director, Kat Lieder, who staged LO in 2013, in Madison, WN. She asked my permission to set the piece in the US and I agreed. According to her, the play settled quite easily into place. When I suggested it to Shirley and her students at the first rehearsal, on Wednesday, she/they readily agreed.

So: the names* have been changed. Leela=Lila; Bhaskar=Oscar; Mohan=Noha; Naina=Nina and Surinder=Kurt. In the photograph below, the narrator (Tristan Lopus) sits to the left reading the stage directions, while the characters sit together in a row, starting with Nina (played by Shirley), then Noah (Noah Hibbard), Lila (Summit Starr), Oscar (Jeremy Miller) and Kurt (Kito Ashbey). The lady-screamer (Mary E. Manack), is only just visible (her forearm!) in the rear. (*I asked Shirley for permission to post names)

There were a few small adjustments that needed to be made in the script -- words like "chowkidar" (=security guard) and "goonda" (*grin* ... changed to "goon") but other details went in unchanged, such as the presence (of course unseen/unheard in the reading, since she is mute during the performance) of the cook, Frieda. Very few American homes would include a live-in cook these days, but we decided to leave her in the performance. At the brief talk-back later we explained that it wasn't our aim to wholly re-write the context of the play. It was stated in the program note that the location of the play had been altered from its source, i.e., Bombay.

Undoubtedly, the hardest part of watching/listening to LO is the screaming. It always comes as a surprise because the play, till that point seems to be a somewhat simple-minded exchange between three tedious middle-class types. Then the screaming begins and the performance transforms into an endurance ordeal. I've seen it several times and this always remains true -- the screaming is very painful to sit through. You want to slap each of the characters one by one for doing nothing to stop it. At the end, there's no question of applause. You want to crawl away and stare quietly at the stars (but there was light snow all of yesterday here! No chance of stars).

I am very grateful to Shirley, her students and the (mostly young) audience for being willing to perform and to attend the performance. I talked a little bit about the background of the play, to confirm that I really did hear about it from a friend who was an eye-witness and that most of what is described IS what was described to me (this fact is stated explicitly at the end of the play in a series of slides). Then we all said our goodnights and went our separate ways.

HERE, THERE & ELSEWHERE: Eps #10

Vive La France!

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HERE, THERE & ELSEWHERE Eps #9

Knock! Knock!

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HERE, THERE & ELSEWHERE, Eps #08

WEED SEED

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HERE, THERE & ELSEWHERE Eps #7

BLUE BOTTLES

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Cosmic Dandruff

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New! New! New! And unfinished.

1. Final version of Corn Stalks One (18"x24", oil on canvas); 2. Corn Stalks Two (18"x24", oil on canvas), take one; 3. Corn Stalks Two, take two; 4. Corn Cobs, take one; 5. Sketches from 2006, Vermont farm, corn; 6. Corn stalks.

Notes: I haven't signed Corn Stalks One yet. I'm not really happy with it but I don't want to do any further work on it. It's done. I was thinking, as I started on the second painting, of a conversation I had with a friend many years ago, about why artists so often repeat images in their paintings. I said then (and I maintain) the reason is that there's an initial irritation, like a mental itch, that wants to be expressed in the form of a painting or drawing. Each time it is expressed, some part of the itch is relieved, but quite often an other area opens up for potential relief. In the case of the corn stalks/corn cobs, the itch began 9 years ago, on a friend's farm, in Vermont. I made those pencil sketches then and have never managed to return to them till these last couple of days. The results are not what I had in mind when I began, but that is also very familiar. The "itch" is constantly evolving, growing and contracting. Sometimes I am happy with the paintings I produce, but most often not. I keep hoping the next one will be the best version. But that, too, rarely happens.