THEY LIKE TO USE “THAT” WORD

I love audiences. Not just because they pay money to see the shows, although that goes a long way towards working their way into my heart. No the reason I love audiences, is I love to hear their reactions to the show. Some times they pull you aside after and tell you how much they like it, other times they make comments during the show.

One comment we got during the show was “Oh… they like to use THAT word.” This was relayed to me by my girlfriend as she was watching Award. Now it’s no secret Jay and I love to use profanity, not just on stage but just in our real lives. We curse like sailors and thus so do our characters. I am especially bad about it; I do it in church, which is why I don’t go a lot. But what I loved about “Oh … they like to use THAT word” was that when the story was relayed back to me, there was no judgment involved. Apparently the woman said it to her friend very matter of factly. So in spite of mine and Jay’s penchant for profanity, she seemed to be on board with it.

Thing is, once you get a crowd that talks out loud they don’t stop. In some cases it’s a good thing. During Award, after Josh said his line about it being true bad movies get nominated for awards; there was an audible “Ooooh” from the audience. Kind of like they practiced it. They were talkers. While setting up for Funeral, Jay and I both heard one woman yell out as we were setting up the furniture, “Wait… is this a kids show?”

By far the biggest reaction we got was from something that wasn’t supposed to happen, and cosmically I think it was my fault. As Award was finishing up on Wednesday, I made a comment like “Wow, we haven’t had any problems with the bed tonight.” And it was true. No shaking, no loud noises. But not two seconds after I said it, WHAM! The legs facing the audience gave way and the bed fell to the floor with Josh and Mal on top of it. Luckily neither of them were hurt, and Josh covered with “You know they are going to charge us for that.” Nice ad lib, saved the scene.

But afterwards, we had all of these people come up and ask if it was planned. UGH, if they only knew we consider it a good show if it doesn’t fall. One woman asked me if it was planned, and when I told her it wasn’t she said “Well in my experience in theater… if something works, you should keep it.” Apparently it was Elaine Stritch. Another friend of Jay’s swore it was planned. He even went so far as to claim he could see the lynch pin that was pulled out off stage. HUH? We don’t even know what a lynch pin is. But yes you totally saw one. It was attached to Wonder Woman’s magic lasso and pulled off stage by the ghost of Charles Nelson Reilly.

Well that was last week’s adventure with the audience. Again I love them, and I love how they make the show their own. We are going to have some nice crowds this week and God only know what they will see.

This is why I love live theater.

OPENING NIGHT

Well it is opening night, the culmination of over a years work. Now we get to see if after all the blood, sweat, and tears, if the shows are any good. (Crossing my fingers)

I used to get really nervous on opening and I probably will right before we open, but right now I am feeling pretty confident about the shows. Not that we haven't had a bumpy ride.

We spent the weekend in tech, and if you don't know already, Tech sucks. For those that don't, Tech is the time when you add all the elements together: acting, props, lights, set, sound, costumes, the kitchen sink. Its a lot like baking a cake, once the cake is done its awesome, but when you first add all the ingredients together, it looks kinda gross.

We had some interesting moments, well no one ran over a homeless guy, but still interesting. During one run of Award, Malorie kicked one of the glasses and broke it. Punted it actually. She could be in the NFL. It was one of those moments where, if she had tried to kick it, she couldn't have. But on accident... she nailed it. So if you watch the show and wonder why there is only one glass in a Four Seasons hotel room, that is why. They also terrorized a script during the show, ripped it to shreds. Again they had never been done this before, yet during one run, this poor prop met it's demise.

Not that Funeral didn't have it's moments too. I am still not sure where, Anne's "Children's husband" came from or Bryce summarizing his monologue to "everything". We also had to ask Tim to wear socks. It seemed like his bare ankles during one run had a special spot light on them.

On the plus side, the Boys in Funeral are happy to finally have a wall. Our rehearsal space most of the time made using the walls for the fight scenes a little hard. For weeks, Ben, Bryce and Tim have been mime-ing walls. So it felt good for them to finally have some walls, so that could start REALLY throwing each other around.

Well just wanted to do a short one before we started letting people in the door. After tonight, in a strange way, the shows no longer belong to Jay and I, but they belong to the cast and the audience. Sometimes it gets hard to let go, but its necessary.

A real quick thanks Aaron Johnson at the Live Bait, Don Johnson and the rest of the cast and crew of "A Murder of Crows" for the fabulous job they did getting the set ready for us. They have no idea how great they are. And to such a great cast. We could not have done it without them.

I hope you all enjoy the shows.

"YOU RAN HIM OVER?!"

We are in the home stretch now, not too much longer till we open. The plan had been to keep the blog updated with the goings on of rehearsals. Unfortunately we are rehearsing two shows. So out of seven days a week, Award may only rehearse two days, but Funeral is rehearsing three. The two left over days you need to get props, do posters, postcards, press releases, coordinate schedule changes, oh and work your full time job, and have some semblance of a life. Give you an example, during the summer my girlfriend and I saw a movie about every weekend. Since we started rehearsals, I haven’t seen a movie since Superbad’s opening weekend. Wouldn’t trade it for anything, but it just leaves little time to blog.

Not that the rehearsals haven’t been eventful. Our first was probably the most. We've been rehearsing in garage of Jay’s sister, Catherine, and brother in law, Jason. They have gone above and beyond, they are also expecting, so our gratitude to them is in the quadruple digits.

Anyway it was one of our first rehearsals for Award; we were in the garage with the doors open, and Jay noticed a homeless man sleeping in the alley against one of the garage doors. Not thinking too much of it, we started rehearsing. Eight pages in, Mal and Josh are going gang busters, but down the alley we hear this thud, and then an “Oh My God.” We walk out into the alley and the see the garage door where the homeless man was sleeping is now opened and a car is half way out of the garage. Yes, you guessed, they ran over the sleeping homeless guy.

Not to long after the cops and the paramedics were on the scene. It was crazy. The paramedics showed up and asked what happened. “We ran over him.” The woman from the car said. “YOU RAN OVER HIM?” was the paramedic’s response. Needless to say the people were freaked and the cop on the scene didn’t make it any better. She kept badgering them about why they didn’t check the door before they pulled out. Like any one would. I wouldn’t have. We found out later, that the homeless in this area do this a lot, so I guess it’s not the worst idea in the world. But still, I’d have never thought to do it. Oh and this cop, who was so concerned about the safety of the people in the alley, tore out of there at like 80 MPH narrowly missing hitting Jay as she stepped back to watch the rehearsal. Chicago’s finest.

The homeless guy ended up being OK. He got up and walked to the ambulance himself. He was limping so luckily they must have run over his leg and not his head or torso. They took him away in the ambulance, so hopefully he got a good night’s sleep someplace not up against a garage door. Jay seemed worried about his shopping cart of stuff. She seemed to think it was full of memories like the last picture he had of his estranged daughter or something. I was pretty sure it was full of cans, and that being homeless, one of his skill sets would be to easily procure a new shopping cart and collection of cans. The homeless can be industrious when they want to be.

This wasn’t the last incident in the garage. During the fight choreography for Funeral, one of Catherine and Jason’s neighbors was concerned about the shouting of the word “Fag” and then the sounds of fighting. Apparently he thought we were gay bashing in the garage, and came over to check. Luckily we convinced him it was only a play. We should have given him a postcard.

We have some time left in the garage. God only knows what will happen next.

THE NAME GAME

One of the things that irritates me about writing is naming characters. It’s important I know, but if I had my druthers, all my characters would have names like “A” or “That Guy” or “Some Random Chick”. It’s too much pressure, like naming a child or something. This is name they are stuck with forever.

There are lots of names in Award and Funeral. Not just main characters, but characters that are mentioned in passing or briefly discussed. You need them to sort of fill out your universe. So to do that you have to sort of grab names from anywhere, either out of your past or out of the ether or wherever. The names of the main characters for Funeral happened this way:

When Jay and I sat down to write Funeral, we agreed the first night that the names of characters would be “Butch”, “Claire”, “Brian” and “Scott”. “Brian” and “Scott” were to be the names of the brothers, who at that time had no last names. So when Jay and I came back in a week and showed each other what we had written, we had a problem. I had made “Brian” the older brother and “Scott” the younger, where as she had “Scott” as the older brother, and “Brian” as the younger brother. After trying to talk about the story for 10 seconds we realized the first thing we needed to do was change the names. She’d say “Scott” and meant the older brother and I thought she meant the younger. So the older brother became “Greg” and the younger brother became “Jake”.

About two days later I decided I hated the name “Jake”. To me, “Jake” sounded like a character John Stamos should play, it sounded like someone cool (I guess this means I think John Stamos is cool). The younger brother wasn’t cool. So “Jake” became “Eric” most likely and subconsciously a throw back to the sarcastic, skinny, uncool character named Eric on That 70’s Show.

We’d like to think the names were sort of picked at random, but that’s not usually not the case. “Claire”, I think, was subconsciously named after Lauren Ambrose’s character from Six Feet Under. I was re-watching the series at the time, and I think it was swimming around my subconscious. “Greg” is the name of my boss at work, but the character wasn't named or based on him. You just say “Greg” and go with that. It’s only in the middle of draft 3 you realize, “Oh yeah, my boss is named Greg”. We also have a friend named Butch, but again that isn’t who we named “Butch” after. Our friend Butch is a woman anyway. This is where the names end up coming from… anywhere, everywhere. So I thought I’d run down some of the other names in the shows and give you some insight as to where they came from.

AWARD
Adam and Reilly - These first names came from my childhood friend and next door neighbor, Adam Reilly. Jay and I felt "Reilly" had a Reese Witherspoon vibe, so we wanted to give her a name that sounded like it could be someone’s last name. Adam was just left over, and it seemed like a good fit for "Adam". So my friend Adam Reilly from Pensacola FL gets a shout out.

Grady Tripp - The script Adam says he is reading is based on “Grady Tripp’s book, The Arsonist’s Daughter”. For those that don’t remember, “Grady Tripp” was Michael Douglas’ character from Wonderboys, and the title of Grady’s book in the movie was The Arsonist’s Daughter.

Marty - An allusion to Martin Scorsese.

Joanne Streams - Our version of Joan Rivers.

Sheila Kelly - Someone I went to college with.

Alexandra Kincaid - First name is a friend of Jay’s.

Lexy Valentine – I am not sure where the name came from. I did work with a guy who’s last name was Valentine, but I am pretty sure Jay made up the name. She may have to blog about it herself.

FUNERAL

Brian Scott - A homage to the original names of “Greg” and “Eric”. Before the names were changed, he was David Stillwagon, someone I went to elementary school with.

Betty – The much talked about mother of “Charles", "Greg" and "Eric” is named after my girlfriend’s mother.

Aunt Helen – Aunt Helen was Jay’s beloved Aunt who passed away. Although the story Greg tells about her, is not one of Aunt Helen’s stories (Aunt Helen had much better stories). Actually the story is from my great grandmother. In an early draft we had two aunts. One that was being honored, “Aunt Helen” and then “Aunt Ester” who was the woman who kept finding the perfume. Jay thought it would be too confusing to have two aunts, so both aunts were combined into Aunt Helen. For the record Aunt Ester was the name of my great grandmother’s sister.

Donnie Wayland – The kid “Greg” beat up as a child is the name of someone I knew in third grade. He was a twin, and his brother's name was Danny.

St. Michaels - The name of the church where Funeral is set comes from a church in Jay’s hometown in Champaign, Illinois.

Charles Wright - The unseen star of Funeral. His name comes from the name of the show Jay and I first wrote together “Charlie”.

A Fine Tooth Comb...

One of the the things Jay and I thought we would do with this blog, is give whomever reads it, an insight to the process of putting up these shows. The thought was that some people might find process interesting. Other people...well not so much not so much. If you aren't one, it's okay. I don't blame you. I mean end of the day, process is trivia, right?

So Saturday, August 10th, we had our first reading for "Funeral". We were pretty excited seeing as how this was the first reading of "Funeral" that did not involve Jay and I reading all of the characters to each other. For those of you who do not know, our wonderful cast for "Funeral" is made up of the fabulous Anne Sheridan Smith, the virile Ben Veatch, the cunning Tim Heurlin, and the electric Bryce Peglow. They did such an awesome job. It was just really awesome to finally hear it out loud. Its totally different with actors doing it. You get to hear what works, what doesn't work, that kind of thing. And most importantly, you find all the typos.

I am the first to admit, I consider grammar and spelling as a list of suggestions, as opposed to they way you are supposed to write so that people understand. Which is why when I write my stuff, it is full of typos and misspellings and nary a semi-colon to be found. Luckily Jay does not feel the same way. Which is why she has to go through the script, especially my stuff, with a "fine tooth comb". And in spite of her best efforts, our little game of grammatical cat and mouse usually ends with a few bit of my "inventive sentence structure" in tact.

Saturdays draft was no different. We had a few mistakes, some dialogue that was confusing and the like. But that is what you are supposed to get at a first reading EVER. Best part is after when the actors ask questions that don't have to do with my typos, about characters and story. It's very exciting. If if you have never experienced this, I suggest you write a play and get people to read it.

That said, I thought it was excellent, and we are so lucky to have such a talented cast. (Actually TWO talented casts). So I hope you guys (whomever "you guys" end up being) tune back in periodically to check on the status. (Could I use parenthesis more?) I think it should be interesting. If its not, I promise I will start making things up like fights or affairs between the cast, crew, Jay and myself. Gotta give the people what they want.

Jason

First Post On This Piece

Hello Friends -

Back Table Productions here.

Please support our work - which will be featured at The Live Bait Theater in October.

Show Dates -

Every Tuesday and Wednesday at 8 PM

Oct. 2, 3

Oct. 9, 10

Oct. 16, 17

Live Bait

www.livebaittheater.com

3914 N. Clark

(Lakeview - just North of Wrigley)

Chicago. IL

Check out FUNERAL and AWARD.

Written by Jay Steigmann and Jason Williams.