Gideon Productions

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Tuesday, June 22, 2004
http://www.gideonth.com/ljmblog/ljm.mpeg Posted at 11:01 AM by sean williams

Bristol Valley Theater

Wednesday, May 26, 2004
We got back from Naples, New York on Sunday afternoon, so of course we've had three days to obsessively try to figure out if anything went wrong and what we could have done better, so let me start from the mindset of having just got back.

The weekend was amazing. If I tell you that four years ago, when Jordana was running the cash box and Dirty Juanita was limping through its pathetic four week run, I knew we would have a success like the one we had last weekend, please punch me in the nose. We could not have asked for the show to run any better than it did.

As avid readers of this blog know, we started out with an idea that we thought was awesome and we just didn't know if it would translate. In rehearsals, our friends and colleagues told us that it was a great show, but we worried about it translating outside the inner circle. Once we ran it at The Gershwin Hotel, we had about 160 people see it who loved it, but that's sort of our outer circle and we wondered if people who didn't know us at all would like it. Once the December shows proved that people we'd never met before liked the show, there was still the lingering wonder if it would play outside New York City.

The other producers may have a different opinion about this, but I think it played *better* outside New York than it did in. There is a sweetness and a solidity to the show that people in Manhattan might roll their eyes at a tiny bit. In Naples, New York, people were genuinely moved. Our digs were pretty nice as well

I don't know how to change the picture size on this Mac, so the pix will be a little big.

The first night we got there we had dinner with the artistic director Karin Bowersock and several members of the board. Karin decided we should eat at our house because there really isn't anywhere in town to eat, which, coming from New York, gave me a moment of panic. We were also told that we had a radio interview the next morning at 8, and all I could think of was "someone in this damn town better have coffee." What I said was, "Does someone in this damn town have coffee for us?"

Sure enough, the place next door made to our apartment (and let's be honest, almost the entire town was next door) made a wicked vanilla latte. You can take the girl out of Hicksville...

So, we made our way to the radio station and were interviewed. It was amazing to have our show publicity taken seriously, we just don't do any publicity at all any more in the city. There is no point. If we'd done a five minute interview in the middle of the Howard Stern show, still no-one would have come to our show. Our good friend Lindsay Bowen's company is producting "Trust" (www.playco.org) and it is one of the best shows I've ever seen, and he isn't getting the audience he deserves.

So, to do a radio broadcast and have it mean something was amazing.

That's the radio station, and here is us, in the radio station, listening to us on the radio station, which didn't happen because it was live...

More tomorrow on our first show, The Marce and The Director and where we go from here... Posted at 9:21 AM by sean williams

Death of the Bit

Wednesday, May 19, 2004
Everyone has their own directing style, and every actor has the directing style they like best. If you find the right director working with the right actors, it can be just magical, but if you get the wrong chemistry, there is very little hope for success. I've been able to work with all kinds of directors, but there are some that are better than others.

First, there are the "Method-Acting-Teaching" directors, or, as my friend Mac affectionately calls them "Ass-Sniffers". They earn the name because in college, these are the guys and gals that have their casts pretending to be different animals, rolling around outside on the quad, sniffing each other in the ass. Although I'm responsive to these kind of directors, I find that I am also completely happy to make their theater peices suck beyond redemption. If they want me to mutter and climb the rope, I'll do it, but I also might screw up the stage combat bits because "my character would actually hit his character, I'm not gonna fake it..."

The other really bad director for me is the "Real-Life-Questions" director. This is the man or woman who will sit down in a quiet place and wants people to be protected so they can let out their inner voices. This is the director who wants to know what *you* are thinking, not your character, and wants to find something in your real life to filter the character through. Fine, I love talking about myself and God knows I need therapy, but the theater isn't about that for me. I hear basketball players talk about the game as if it was a sanctuary, a place where they can leave the lives inside their heads behind them, and that's how I feel about the theater. Mock me all you want, and I wouldn't say this outside a blog, but the theater is a holy place designed for theater, I really don't want therapy happening there.

Then there are the "Complete-World" directors. These are some of my favorites, although I'm not sure I make good plays with them. These guys and gals are theater-geeks down to their cuticles, they have created full and complete fourth walls for the actors, they know where every single screw is in the set, they know every answer to a lighting or sound design question. Man, I love hanging out with these guys, although the tend to be a little closed off socially.

Another fun director, but one I don't think makes great plays with me, is the "Crazy-Idea" person. He or she will come into a situation with incredibly creative ways of managing problems. This is more than just repeating the line back to the person as a question, this is "giving someone a roller skate and making them hold it in their left hand over the other person's head" kind of solutions. I love these directors, but they don't necessarily *direct* so much as fix mistakes. I find it hard to go from getting it right to being brilliant with people like this.

The last kind is who we are working with now, and it's one of the ones I respond to best. This is the "Bit-Master". He or she is here to direct a play, to create moments where before there were no moments, to give direction to all that happens around them. Our director, John Hurley, trusts the actors, trusts the writing and trusts the technical stuff will go right. But he doesn't trust the audience. He didn't ask us to do anything unless there was a hole in the show, a hole that the audience might get bored during, even for five seconds.

He has turned chunks of this play into *entertainment*. All three of us, as actors, is a bit shy in our own way, when we aren't sure of what we should be doing to make scene play, we slip into different mistakes. My personal crutch is to mug the crap out of a scene. Mac falls back on the words and allows them to speak for him and Jordana focuses on making every single detail correct, just the way we rehearsed. John caresses these bad moments, makes them something more, by giving us something to *do*, something to *act*.

However, it doesn't always work. Last night, we had to put a bit to sleep. At the end of one set of lines, we were in one position on the stage, the next set of lines John wanted us somewhere else. We could just walk over to our spots, but John won't let five seconds of unfunny last in this play. So we did a crazy little dance cross in the original rehearsals, John cut it. Then we did a little fight, John hated it and cut it. Then we did a tiny piece of physical comedy. It worked, our stage manager let out a little chuckle, but the next few lines didn't work.

So, he cut it. It almost caused him *pain* to let a few seconds of down time happen in the play, but he did it.

Tomorrow, we leave for upstate. I don't know if I can update from there, but we will have lots to write about when we get back. Posted at 4:27 PM by sean williams

Uhhhh... Line?

Thursday, May 13, 2004
So, you want to produce a play in New York that features you as an actor? Okay, first thing you gotta know is, as soon as anyone hears that they are gonna *ROLL THEIR EYES*, brother. These are the funniest notices I get in my inbox...

**********
Presenting a new drama by New York's own Guy Youneverheardof

"A Criminal Be-Havior"

Starring
Guy Youneverheardof
Reallyhot Girlontheverge*
Guy's Collegeroomate

What happens when a young woman responds to scorn with *SEDUCTION*? Find out in "A Criminal Be-Havior"

"Startling" says the New York Post
"Powerful... Obsessive" says the Oneonta Picayune.

Produced by Guy Youneverheardof
$15 tickets, $14 with this email notice! Get your tickets now!
**************

And if you go see the show, you're astonished that the Girl On The Verge is actually super hot, super talented, and willing to wear a tight white tank top and no bra and is also willing to make out with the playwright. In two years this girl is gonna be on TV, and Guy Youneverheardof isn't gonna have to change his name.

So, be prepared for the fact that writing, producing and acting in your own play is actually a recipe for derision. How do we avoid that? Well, the Mac Rogers plays we've done actually feature Mac being humiliated, usually with his pants off...

...and we try to feature actors and actresses that have more talent than star power. But, nevertheless, we do get made fun of when we do it, and rightly so.

We generally don't really care. People seem to love the shows, so let 'em roll their eyes.

The second thing you have to be prepared for is a conflict of interest. For instance, as a guy interested in the company making money, I don't really care if we make it into the fringe festival with this show. The show has already built a tiny following, it will play in any theater in America and we have a booking agent who knows that, and the Fringe will make us lose money. But as an actor and a New York Theater dude, I want us in the Fringe really bad because it means reviews and *relevance* in our world here. So, you'll have moments where successes are just failures and failures are just successes, but in different clothes.

The third thing is, you won't do some of your jobs very well.

I'm fairly certain I'm calling for a line in this picture, and Mac is suffering a thousand little deaths in the background while saying to himself "My WORDS! My precious WORDS!" We're just actors right here, but since we've spent so much of our time trying to be other things outside of rehearsal, sometimes we drop the ball once we're in.

And you have to ask yourself as a producer, would someone else do this better? The immediate answer you have to accept is "yes", no matter how nuanced and rad you think you are, there are other actors in the world who are as good as you are, and if all they had to do was think about the acting, they would be better.

Although no-one involved with this project, and that includes other producers who have offered to buy the show off of us, can imagine this project without Jordana as Lucretia.

One more thing you have to deal with, you can't get mad at the producers for saving money on cheap-ass rehearsal space. Every actor would love to have a real theater in which to rehearse, but every producer would love to have our hook-up...

The Astoria Performing Arts Center has been extremely gracious in allowing us to rehearse in the building they share with the church next door. It's usually a day care, but at night there's nothing happening there and, as long as we return everything exactly as we found it, we can rehearse there as much as we like. I can't tell you how amazing it is to have space here in Astoria, with all the props in the back of my car. This show couldn't have happened without their generosity, and y'all should go check out their show running now.

And, if you want to feel better about how you spend your time, check out the day care schedule for these kids...

Y'know, once I'm done with story time, then lunch time, then bathroom, then nap time, then snack time, then another visit to the bathroom, then song PLUS story time, I feel like the only thing to do next that makes any sense is free play.

Of course, the producer side of me cringes at those words... Posted at 12:52 PM by sean williams

WE'RE BACK!!!!!!!

Monday, May 10, 2004
I'm going to go in to the whys and wherefors later, suffice it to say, we have secured our first engagement for the Lucretia Jones Mysteries outside the city of New York. We go up May 21 and 22 at the Bristol Valley Theater in Naples, New York.

We are psyched as all get out. We've scheduled six rehearsals and one run through up at the space, which may seem like overkill to you, but we *sucked* the last time we tried to do the show without enough rehearsal, and we are never going to do that again.

Okay, we didn't suck. Everyone loved the show. But we didn't feel like we had done the best possible show we could do, and it isn't even that we are perfectionists or anything, there just is too much theater in the world to waste your time doing it badly. Here we are at our first rehearsal back.

Don't we look like we're having fun?

I'll be honest, that was at the end of the rehearsal. Mac is flirting with the Marce, our fearless leader is eating cookies and Jordana is going over the marriage certificate she had just received in the mail from her nuptials last weekend. Which, it turns out, were also my nuptials. The theater is a dangerous place, if you want to avoid nuptials. Here's a real rehearsal picture.

Yes, that's Beethoven's death mask over Mac's head. He's good luck. And yes, Jordana is still eating cookies. But that's sort of how we do things.

So, we're back and better than ever. Much business to discuss anon, I want to see if I can actually sort of chart this process a little better this time. Posted at 10:55 PM by sean williams

New Show

Tuesday, December 16, 2003
We have been hired to do Lucretia for an office Christmas Party. That may not seem like much, but all three of us are very excited about it. We've been polishing up and runing lines. We're getting paid for the whole thing, and we will be having a Gideon Party with invited guests soon. We will be announcing the Employee of the Year, with a plaque and a $50 bonus.

Yeah, there are maybe five total employees, and everyone's getting $50, we just thought it would be funny to have an Employee of the Year.

Stay Tuned! Posted at 11:16 AM by sean williams

Second life beginning

Tuesday, October 28, 2003
Our show opened and closed, and we were really excited because we had accomplished *exactly* what we were aiming for. We went backwards, assuming we could get 150-175 people in to the show, assuming they would pay $15 each, and then decided we would pay no more than that and try to break even.

More exciting than that, however, was the idea that the show we had made translated to the audience exactly the way we wanted it to. There were some groups that didn't laugh as much as others, but there was never that moment when you drop a punchline to dead air. And although there were a few people who did the forced polite "it's so great to see you all doing this together", all of the theater people who saw the show were effusive.

So, now we have to decide the future of the show. Theatersource offered us a limited run in January, but that won't work for our schedules. UCB is considering the show, but we're not sure its right for the crowd that normally sees those shows.

The Fringe Festival next year is a possibility. We were alternates this year, and if we can get anyone from that company to look at a tape, it might help. Even better if they can see an actual show.

Mac talked it over with the incredible people at Manhattan Theatersource, and they offered us a "flop night", a night that they haven't rented that the theater would otherwise lose money on. They keep the box office but they also charge us no rent.

They had four days next week, and we asked to do one day, Monday, November 3. It's the easiest day of the week to get producers and industry people in because they don't have shows that day, no-one does, so we're the only game in town.

We go into rehearsals tonight. I'm gonna have to spend some script time today, but man, it feels so good to be working on something I love this much. Posted at 11:11 AM by sean williams