Recently I posted photos of OU's production of Texarkana and they got me thinking. I loved that production. I loved the process, the staff, the cast, everything about it. My one regret is not being there for closing night. Opening was great, but based on first hand reports, the show matured and by closing night was a wonder.
The set, lighting and costume design were fantastic and the photos do a good job of capturing it.
Texarkana got a lot of great reviews, but the best and maybe the most meaningful came from someone who saw the OU production. What I get from it is that I told a good story and that the way I chose to tell the story, the conventions and structure of the script, were theatrical and performable. It's the performable part that concerns me most now. My direct input, and that input put into action, seem to be a requirements for success. My input having no impact had much to do with Texarkana's failure in NY.
If you're not me, it's a tricky show to make work. I do a lot with language, and performing styles and conventions make the language, and therefore the characters and story, come alive. The cowboys speak verse. Most actors and directors have a reference for the size and energy required to make those scenes come alive. People have a much harder time wrapping their heads around what's required for Eddie's storyline. The Dallas/Morgan plot is the most straight forward, but somehow the most difficult to get right.
For A Trick or Treat, I'm keeping it straightforward. No special knowledge of theatre history or theory is required. Living, breathing, competent actors and a love of Pop Culture will suffice. The goal being that any theatre can make the script a success, that the story and the dialogue will compensate for the theatre's lost skills, that my participation is optional.
Here's the letter:
From: Thomas Long
Sent: Tuesday, September 27, 2005 1:09 PM
To: Cook, Rena R.
Subject: Waltz
April 12, 2005
To the Texarkana Waltz company:
During my years working in theatre and observing new works, I have never seen a performance of a new play so well integrated and mesmerizing as Louis Broome's Texarkana Waltz.
At Friday night's performance it was only a few minutes into the play that I completely forgot the cast were students. You must know by now that you have something very extraordinary, and a precious and personal journey to remember far into the future.
It has been four days since I saw your remarkable work, and I still think about it, relish it, and turn it over in my mind again and again. I have always believed that this is the ultimate test of an important play.
Louis Broome has created a work so unique it defies labeling. It is one of a kind. Even Polonius could not categorize it. The play touches on contemporary issues without specificity. This is no small achievement. As audience we think of same-sex relationships, our own spirituality, the right to live and the right to die, capital punishment, law and order, and our own existential moment on earth. All of this is accomplished without judgment.
It is an extremely difficult play to direct and act. The story moves cinematically in time and space, but you are consistently clear in telling a compelling tale while allowing us look deep into the psyche of each character. The performance becomes Pinteresque for the characters are separated from the common culture as they struggle to live in their own.
The combined talents of Tom Huston Orr and Rena Cook blend so well, they are indistinguishable from each other. The two directors serve the play and the players splendidly. We are never consciously aware of their crafts of staging and coaching, creating a quality every director strives to achieve. Directors Orr and Cook allow layer upon layer of compelling content to surface and the voice of Louis Broome to speak to us. Importantly, the text of the play is never didactic.
Texarkana Waltz is a triumph as entertainment. The audience is asked to recognize the lighter side of the characters, and then to submit suddenly, and without the slightest hint of the tragedy to come, to visceral shock and surprise. These moments are exceedingly rare in drama, requiring enormous leaps of faith in the unfolding play and performance. In Texarkana Waltz this is so well executed, we consent to its frankness and integrity.
Thank you, company, for sharing your unforgettable odyssey.
Thomas Long (Ph.D.)
Monday, March 10, 2008
Wednesday, February 06, 2008
How to Kill a Play: The Life and Death of Texarkana Waltz
In the beginning, there was Red Meat Substitutes. Me, Ron Owens, Laura McCord, Henry Mark, Richard Davis, and Victoria Safriet filled the vacuum that was Tulsa's theatre avaunt guarde with inspired lunacy. Texarkana Waltz begain life as a Red Meat play. Red Meat's past is a future blog, but our impact can be summed up with a story.
Bret Masterson, a later day Red Meater, threw parties that were minor miracles. In Tulsa, of all God-forbidden, east of Eden places, one could count on a Masterson fete being interesting, often dramatic, and fueled by booze of a quality and quantity that even now brings tears to my eyes. A few years after moving to Seattle I went back to Tulsa, happy to be the excuse Bret needed to host a soiree. That evening I met a newcomer.
I can't remember his name, so let's call him Lucky. Lucky and I struck up a conversation. He was home from school where he studied acting. Acting? No shit. Why the fuck study acting? Once upon a time, he told me, his eyes growing misty, when he was in high school there was a theatre company called Red Meat Substitutes. He told me how remarkable they were, daring, dangerous even, how he's an actor because of Red Meat Substitutes.
Red Meat Substitutes? Never heard of them. Tell me more.
At first I was honored and proud, what I imagined Bob Dylan, confronted by a disciple, might feel were he human and not the Poet-Deity of our age. Then I realized our true impact. If our little theatre troupe inspired this young man to pursue a life in the theatre, how many other lives had we ruined?
Such is the power of unbridled passion and youth.
For one of our last Red Meat shows, Back from the Dead, 1988, Ron wrote a beautiful little play, Madam Palma's House of Psychic Head Readings, about Madam Palma, her niece, Angel, and an injured stranger, David - think Glass Menagerie meets Twilight Zone. Laura McCord's Madam Palma was brilliant, and I loved her relationship with Angel. For our next and second to last Read Meat show, True Love, 1989, I borrowed Ron's characters for my contribution, The Sad Lament of Eddie Wickett on the Night of His Execution (props to Sam Shepard).
Eddie, the electric chair and one of Texarkana's key riffs, "De doi de doi de doi, de hun dee dud!" I borrowed from Henry Mark's Head Trip, one of the funniest, nastiest short plays ever written. The electric chair also references Sam Shepard's Killer's Head. Clearly, I had a Sam thing.
In Sad Lament, Madam Palma's niece, Angel, is Eddie's penitentiary pen-pal wife. On the night of Eddie's execution, at the moment of his death, Madam Palma attempts to join Angel and Eddie's souls in eternity. She fails, and Angel ends the play crying out repeatedly for Eddie, lost forever in nothingness, fade to black.
Flash forward three years to Seattle, 1992. As a result of gainful underemployment and the recent death of my mother, I was moved to take up writing again. Sad Lament was my best work to date (after a performance I'd overheard the woman behind me describe it as perfect, so I was inclined to think it perfect but short), so I decided to turn it into a full length play.
Six years later, Madam Palma and Angel are gone, cowboys have joined the cast, and Texarkana Waltz opens in L. A to the kind of reviews you'd give ten years of your life to get (see Playwright on my Web site). It sold. Audiences laughed and cried. It was nominated for four Ovation Awards, one for writing. It was a hit.
In 2000, it was a hit in Seattle.
In New York, 2002, it bombed. Before I get to why, a few words about the script.
Texarkana Waltz is not the greatest play ever written, it has its flaws, but it is a moving, compelling, engaging and magical two hours of entertainment. My primary goal is to entertain - all else follows. I've seen a lot of plays in my day, most unbearably boring, entertainment clearly not a priority. Most plays are academic, a thesis that can be neatly summed up in a short paragraph, the better for grant applications. I'm an entertainer of the old school - Wow 'em! I set out to write a revolutionary, popular entertainment, to strike the balance between art and commerce, and I succeeded in two out of three productions.
The L. A. and Seattle productions were very similar. Same director, Alison Narver, same designer, Gary Smoot, and most of the same cast. For both, everything came together - the script, direction, design, music and cast were transcendent. The wheel was tweaked, not reinvented.
The New York production was radically different. It was bad. It deserved a good beating. The critics blamed me, the writer. Critics are poor, ignorant bastards deserving of our pity. They should all be put down. They never get the fact that a play isn't the script, it's the sum of its parts.
Texarkana Waltz died in New York because the producers, smart, successful, lovely women I love for taking a chance on an unknown first timer, among other qualities and virtues, never had a prayer. Texarkana's only chance for success would've been to remount the L.A. production. That was never an option because the theatre's business model is broken (read my blog, and Mike Daisey's article in The Stranger).
When it comes time to produce my next play, A Trick or Treat, the goal won't be great reviews - I'll never get better reviews than the reviews I got for Texarkana - and New York is worthwhile only as a means. The goal is to pay off my house. Trick or Treat is being developed as a property that will gladly sell its soul to the highest bidder.
Bret Masterson, a later day Red Meater, threw parties that were minor miracles. In Tulsa, of all God-forbidden, east of Eden places, one could count on a Masterson fete being interesting, often dramatic, and fueled by booze of a quality and quantity that even now brings tears to my eyes. A few years after moving to Seattle I went back to Tulsa, happy to be the excuse Bret needed to host a soiree. That evening I met a newcomer.
I can't remember his name, so let's call him Lucky. Lucky and I struck up a conversation. He was home from school where he studied acting. Acting? No shit. Why the fuck study acting? Once upon a time, he told me, his eyes growing misty, when he was in high school there was a theatre company called Red Meat Substitutes. He told me how remarkable they were, daring, dangerous even, how he's an actor because of Red Meat Substitutes.
Red Meat Substitutes? Never heard of them. Tell me more.
At first I was honored and proud, what I imagined Bob Dylan, confronted by a disciple, might feel were he human and not the Poet-Deity of our age. Then I realized our true impact. If our little theatre troupe inspired this young man to pursue a life in the theatre, how many other lives had we ruined?
Such is the power of unbridled passion and youth.
For one of our last Red Meat shows, Back from the Dead, 1988, Ron wrote a beautiful little play, Madam Palma's House of Psychic Head Readings, about Madam Palma, her niece, Angel, and an injured stranger, David - think Glass Menagerie meets Twilight Zone. Laura McCord's Madam Palma was brilliant, and I loved her relationship with Angel. For our next and second to last Read Meat show, True Love, 1989, I borrowed Ron's characters for my contribution, The Sad Lament of Eddie Wickett on the Night of His Execution (props to Sam Shepard).
Eddie, the electric chair and one of Texarkana's key riffs, "De doi de doi de doi, de hun dee dud!" I borrowed from Henry Mark's Head Trip, one of the funniest, nastiest short plays ever written. The electric chair also references Sam Shepard's Killer's Head. Clearly, I had a Sam thing.
In Sad Lament, Madam Palma's niece, Angel, is Eddie's penitentiary pen-pal wife. On the night of Eddie's execution, at the moment of his death, Madam Palma attempts to join Angel and Eddie's souls in eternity. She fails, and Angel ends the play crying out repeatedly for Eddie, lost forever in nothingness, fade to black.
Flash forward three years to Seattle, 1992. As a result of gainful underemployment and the recent death of my mother, I was moved to take up writing again. Sad Lament was my best work to date (after a performance I'd overheard the woman behind me describe it as perfect, so I was inclined to think it perfect but short), so I decided to turn it into a full length play.
Six years later, Madam Palma and Angel are gone, cowboys have joined the cast, and Texarkana Waltz opens in L. A to the kind of reviews you'd give ten years of your life to get (see Playwright on my Web site). It sold. Audiences laughed and cried. It was nominated for four Ovation Awards, one for writing. It was a hit.
In 2000, it was a hit in Seattle.
In New York, 2002, it bombed. Before I get to why, a few words about the script.
Texarkana Waltz is not the greatest play ever written, it has its flaws, but it is a moving, compelling, engaging and magical two hours of entertainment. My primary goal is to entertain - all else follows. I've seen a lot of plays in my day, most unbearably boring, entertainment clearly not a priority. Most plays are academic, a thesis that can be neatly summed up in a short paragraph, the better for grant applications. I'm an entertainer of the old school - Wow 'em! I set out to write a revolutionary, popular entertainment, to strike the balance between art and commerce, and I succeeded in two out of three productions.
The L. A. and Seattle productions were very similar. Same director, Alison Narver, same designer, Gary Smoot, and most of the same cast. For both, everything came together - the script, direction, design, music and cast were transcendent. The wheel was tweaked, not reinvented.
The New York production was radically different. It was bad. It deserved a good beating. The critics blamed me, the writer. Critics are poor, ignorant bastards deserving of our pity. They should all be put down. They never get the fact that a play isn't the script, it's the sum of its parts.
Texarkana Waltz died in New York because the producers, smart, successful, lovely women I love for taking a chance on an unknown first timer, among other qualities and virtues, never had a prayer. Texarkana's only chance for success would've been to remount the L.A. production. That was never an option because the theatre's business model is broken (read my blog, and Mike Daisey's article in The Stranger).
When it comes time to produce my next play, A Trick or Treat, the goal won't be great reviews - I'll never get better reviews than the reviews I got for Texarkana - and New York is worthwhile only as a means. The goal is to pay off my house. Trick or Treat is being developed as a property that will gladly sell its soul to the highest bidder.
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