Follow Through

Yesterday (thanks to an informal assignment set by

Friend Nat

[you're my boy, Blue]) I completed the first draft of a short play, the first bit of fiction writing I have seen through to the state of having a distinct and spelled-out beginning, middle and end since . . . well, I can't recall. It

is

a first draft, and was largely worked through during lunch breaks and lulls at il day jobo, so it's not a magnificent accomplishment. Still and all, there was a very pleasant sense of synergy I experienced in the writing of it and, as you can see, the mere fact of finishing something has me feeling cuddly with myself. So it got me to thinking about the "Notions" series (& a

1

, & a

2

, & a

3

) of 'blog entries I shared with my tremendous, and tremendously grateful, reading populace all the way back in October/November of 2007. (Verily, Odin's Aviary has become an institution.) (Please refrain from unsavory "institution" insinuations. That's rude.) The idea behind those was to experiment with how the accountability that announcing creative intentions invites would affect their outcomes. Simply put, would sharing my ideas for projects sap my enthusiasm for them (as it seemed to when I was younger) or would it hold me to my ideas and keep them coming back to my priorities list? Let's take a look, shall we?

• Freaky Chicks & Aspirant. These are my two most interesting ideas (to me, at any rate) for comic-book adventures, the first being one I wrote a draft of way back 'round 2000, the second being one I had the idea for RIGHT BEFORE HEROES CAME OUT, I SWEAR TO GOD. Both toy with the notions (heh-heh) of superhero(TM)-like people cropping up in mundane settings, and rather unwilling partnerships. These ideas, I confess, I've done absolutely nothing with in the intervening months. Can I explain myself in this? Not really interested in doing that, I'm afraid. Also: No. I can't. I really like these ideas, still. I just haven't done the work necessary to resurrect them.

• The Project Project. This is a play I badly wanted to write when first I thought of it, and is most likely of all of my announced notions to go the way of the Dodo. Frankly, the title is the thing I dig the most about anything I've come up with for it. I started writing it, and got about five pages in before feeling like I had really gotten off on the wrong foot. I found the characters unsympathetic and the structure nonexistent -- two very bad things, made worse by the fact that I was in complete control of both of them. Clever titles are like booby-traps for frustrated writers, man. And this one's a bear trap, because I can't get over how great it could be, if only I could figure how to make it have a heart.

• Mimosa Pudica. A play I directed in college; the idea being that I mount a showcase production of it here with me directing. I haven't re-read the play, I haven't researched a thing along these lines, nor been mentally casting. I've barely thought about it. BUT. Over the past few months a burgeoning desire to direct has been building, and expressing itself through this here 'blog. I think the important thing about this particular notion was that it got me thinking that way with a fairly safe specificity, and now my thinking has expanded to more daring possibilities (such as directing my own Zuppa-style show) which, frankly, may be more apt. Mimosa Pudica may still get done though. It would probably be a good idea to have an intermediate step between my intention and my ambition.

• Building various stilt-related paraphernalia. Mmm, yeah. Well, this is a tough one when you don't have ready access to a workshop. Also tough when your stilts have been in storage for the past three months. And finally, Corporate Carnival queered me on stilts for a little bit. May be coming out of that soon; still would be lacking a power saw or titanium lathe. (Though I do have some nifty welding goggles.)

• Picking back up the trombone. Uh-huh. Next!

• Punch & Judy. Heather and I have made very little headway on this project; just a bit of research (including a wicked-rad find by Samantha Philips) and discussion. However, it definitely informed our creation of Love is Crazy, but Good for our performances in Italy in June, and the experience of working on that ended up being a crucial step toward things like learning how to work together without outside assistance and learning what works, what doesn't. It's difficult to develop something whilst in separate cities, and with so much other Zuppa-related work to do, but I'm confident Heather and I will get something of this up off the ground.

• Superhero(r) monodrama. I don't know how I feel about this notion, these days. The ubiquitous monodrama of the self-generating "creactor" is still something I'd like to have under my belt, but I feel more and more that I need collaborators to get my best work done. It's how I've worked all my life, really, and I'm not sure I'd even want to see a monodrama that had existed in solo for any significant stage of its development. Plus, when I had the idea, the Hollywood superhero(c) phenomenon hadn't quite hit the fever pitch it's at now. I would probably be working against a curve with that concept. Back to the notional drawing board, as far as I'm concerned.

• Using Friend Patrick's Sukeu mask in performance. See above? I don't know. In the spirit of Patrick himself, I'm loathe to apply the mask to something artificially. I want it to inform me of what it belongs with. This may entail getting in a room (with a mirror) with it and playing, without context. Which I should do anyway. It goes on the to-do list under "get new acting job." Patrick?

• My werewolf novel. You know, I increasingly feel that this story I've been writing and ruminating over has been co-opted by its own inciting notion. That is to say, maybe I don't want to write a story about werewolves (but literature needs another werewolf novel!) after all, and I shouldn't try so hard to make it be about that. What interested me and got me started on it was this different idea of what a werewolf might be. What has been most engaging about writing it (and I haven't done any writing on it in a long while) has been one of the non-central characters and writing about people who feel lost. So: Maybe I'm writing two different things without knowing it?

• The Very Nearly Perfect Comedy of Romeo & Juliet. It has a title! And a webpage! AND a 'blog! This is certainly the prospective project that has been most worked upon out of my lists, which is in keeping with my suggestion that I need collaborators to get anything done. In fact, the entire nature of the project is one of collaboration, being as it is a vehicle for collaborating with Italian artists, and I can hardly take credit for it as "my" notion anymore; if, in fact, I ever could. The very concept has leapt ahead, and in the best ways, in my opinion. I read my initial idea for the play and cringe a bit at the thought of working on something like that right now. Perhaps it's valuable, in the interests of getting projects accomplished, to think of them as inevitable, and also as something that will ultimately bear very little resemblance to the original notion.

• Red Signal. The clown, quasi-silent film screenplay. This, above all, is my most frustrating venture. Not because I haven't made progress on it; I have. That's the source of said frustration, because (much like a subway train faced with a...wait for it...) the writing hit a brick wall somewhere around March/April. There are a number of possible causes for this -- getting a new day job, busting my laptop, health concerns, getting on and into other projects -- but what it boils down to is that I feel rather out of ideas, and with three acts of a five-act outline all figured out (it's act the third that I have been stalled on; five's ready to roll). Three is certainly the magic number, and I'm confident that the cutting stage of this process will be immense, but I'm just not there yet. Something vital is missing. Apart from occasionally pondering (futility) the casting of the female role, I haven't returned to it in earnest since running out of track. Which. Is. Frustrating.

So all in all: I don't feel too bad about how I've done. I realize this list may read like it's largely a schedule of a lack of completion, but in writing it I've been reminded that every process is just that, and one can't rush it or skip steps. I could certainly have done better (especially when it comes to stilts, trombones and comicbooks) but I see in most of these notions a progression, at least in thinking. I'd like to be more productive ultimately, but that's why I checked in on these in the first place: to see how I can do that. In the spirit of this, this entry represents no great goal post, but another step in the process at large. So. Do I think sharing my ideas helped them move along?

Didn't hurt . . .

Up in Smoke

Last night I acted in a staged reading of one of

Tom Rowan

's plays,

Burning Leaves

. Foist of all: I have a lot of audience members from the night to be grateful for. It must have seemed like I was packing the house, which would be easy to do--it was easily the smallest "theatre" space I have ever worked in. It was akin to a return to the womb, and the play is not, as yet, a short one, so I owe big thanks to Friends

Geoff

,

Natalia

,

Kate C.

,

Sister Virginia

and

Fiancee Megan

. Way to go, guys. Way. To. Go.

Not that the experience was in any way bad. The script is, in fact, excellent. My friends were very engaged by the story and the performances, and only had critique for the run time -- a quite forgivable fault in my opinion when it comes to an initial reading. This was evidently a reading aimed at giving Tom some perspective on his work in action; the crowd seemed intimate and friendly, and he has already got a literary agent representing him (she was in the front row, and what I wouldn't give to know her response). I felt fairly good about my work, though I had a bit of that familiar sensation wherein I think to myself, "Damn--that went so much better in rehearsal..." It's hard to get away from that, particularly in a performance that has such a brief and concentrated rehearsal period. I just try to remind myself that some things go worse, but others go better, and I just have to stay open to the possibility each time of having the most true and effective performance yet.

I had several reasons to meditate on the various distractions that can enter an actor's concentration during his or her work, even while the reading went along. Not that I wasn't kept busy: I think there were maybe ten pages out of over a hundred on which my character didn't have substantial dialogue. The distractions, though seemed to begin to gang up on me even prior to entering that (very small) room. I had dressed casually nice for the event, and was careful to keep myself that way through my work day, but at my hasty dinner I spilled grease on my pants. The chairs we sat in for the reading had arms (rehearsal did not), which felt limiting and inappropriate, somehow. And my friends, God bless them, all sat in one corner and were not shy about being themselves. Add to that the audience just being very visible and very close in general, and you have yourself many interesting choices for being taken out of character. Fortunately for me, the script is very effective, to the point at which I almost didn't need to manifest the emotions involved. They were just there, ready.

In some ways, being an actor can boil down to an exercise in determination and concentration. The funny thing is, we have to remain supple and open at the same time, to allow impulses in and unpredictable forces to affect us. My character in this reading, a former NYC actor who moves to a more suburban environment to teach, recalls a director he worked for telling him acting should be a "stripping away of layers" to his soul. Apart from this immediately reminding me of the onion scene from

Peer Gynt

, it also reminds me of how the actual craft of acting, at its best, seems to work. Never mind souls and Truth, and all. A really successful acting experience is all about shedding, rather than accumulating, layers of analysis and lines and decision and fear and, hell, everything. Even the concentration so necessary for doing an effective job has to eventually become unnecessary. We're aiming for an emptiness, a nothingness, of sorts, to become cyphers for . . . what? Maybe it is Truth (by which I mean something more than simple verisimilitude), or maybe it's some kind of human energy, continuous and interdependent. I can't say. All I can say is that my best memories of jobs well done are suspiciously blank. They're mostly just a

knowing

of having hit the sweet spot, and the collective details are as impossible to touch as a leaf turned to ashes on the wind.

This reading was no such sweet spot on my part, though it went well enough. It was, however, one of those experiences that reminds me that this work is worth the struggle, the concentration, all of it. Sometimes, it seems like a very good trade-off indeed.

God Bless the US

Last night, after a weekend's worth of rehearsals, I was involved in another staged reading of

Justin Warner

's play,

American Whupass

. (You may recall

my last encounter with this play

[and with the dude from

Clerks

]

over a year ago.) When last we left

American Whupass

, it was slotted to be performed in New Jersey in the fall of this year. Since I hadn't heard anything more about this production since, I thought to myself, "Aw. They found someone else. Aw. Poop." Exactly like that. I enjoy the play very much, and continually find new things to pursue in portraying "my" character in it, Terry Bowen, campaign-manager savant extraordinaire. To my pleasant surprise--and, I'm sure, Justin's extreme frustration--the play was dropped from production, which is why I hadn't heard hide nor hair since, until Justin emailed me asking me to audition for a new group producing a reading of it.

Theatre Resources Unlimited

is producing staged readings in the next month for a panel of producers to provide feedback, and

AW

was put up in this series last night.

The venue is an interesting one. By and large, the intention of

the reading series

is to give feedback on

producing

a given play; that is, getting it up in a venue, marketing it, etc. This means that for the first time we were performing the play without the intention of getting feedback for improving the script itself. We were hoping to present the best product possible, in order to win over producers interested in doing just that. It remains to be seen where the play will get next as a result, but Justin is a brilliant worker, and there's little doubt that he'll pursue its production to the last. Incidentally,

Friend Todd

is appearing in the third installment in this series, which is the conflict that prevents him from joining

Zuppa del Giorno

in Italy this month. Small enough, world?

I had a hell of a good time working on this play again. I always do, but this time was different in many ways. We've never had so much time to work on the play itself in prelude to performing it, and we had a very insightful and professional director in

Nancy Robillard

, who saw me personally through a lot of discoveries about my role. (To top it all off, we were rehearsing in a penthouse in Tribeca, which ain't half bad.

Bill Fairbairn

was amongst our cast, and his apartment ain't half bad, lemme tell you.)

American Whupass

is a play that deals in logical absurdities, yet it's all grounded in real-life examples and motivations. I've written about its unique quality before, so I won't go on at length, but I will take a moment to observe that it's strange that such a quality should be so unique. People love this brand of comedy, at once ridiculous, yet perfectly believable. It goes back to ancient Greece. Why should it be so rare these days?

It all went down at

The Players Theatre

, a cool space with a narrow seating area that was very evocative of a sense of depth. (Of course, no backstage space to speak of because we are, after all, talking about New York real estate.) I think the reading went well. We had some good audience reactions, and

Friend Kira

was in attendance to provide some complimentary words afterwards. It's just possible, though, that I played my role a little too close to the cuff.

Bowen is a duplicitous dude who starts out seeming very Johnny America, only to reveal more and more his win-at-any-cost perspective. I've played him variously over a span of nearly three years now (That's nearly like a quasi-successful sitcom [if said sitcom just featured the same episode with minor variations over and over again]!), and what appealed to me at first is still my favorite aspect: He believes in what he's doing, and that the results make him "the good guy." An actor can get down with that, man! It's also great to play him completely straight in the beginning, when he seems pure, with an awareness of his orchestrations behind the scenes.

However, the play has a kind of "avalanche of absurdity" effect, integrated not only into the writing but also into the dramatic action, and I think I missed the boat on riding that this time around. My affection for playing Bowen straight should have relented a bit more, and I should have let myself get a bit more wrapped up in the action. A classic example: When the daughter of the senator Bowen is trying to keep in the Senate enters the race against him, Bowen tells the senator, "You've got to stop her before it's too late, Wayne. There is no template for this. No template!" I understand this moment implicitly. It's best when "No template!" comes screeching out almost involuntarily. The man's career hangs in the balance, not to mention the public safety of hundreds of the senator's constituents. On Monday, I played the line very sincerely, but failed to allow my voice to crack, which is something that has happened in every other reading of the scene I've ever done. A small thing, to be sure. The devil is in the details.

To what do I attribute this change? I'm so glad I asked. I've been mulling it over for a little while, and have a few possible explanations. The first, and simplest, is just as I've said above: I'm enamored of playing the character straight. He functions well in this way and, oddly enough, feels more loathsome to me by the end (which I relish). The second is that I may be making this change in my performance in general these days; as I grow older, I'm looking for subtler cues and effects, ways of accomplishing the same things without as much noisy energy as I might have opted for in earlier years. This venerable-sounding choice should also be viewed in the light of fairly regular feedback I've received over the years that my choices as an actor need to be "toned down," or that I need to be "calmed down" for a straight play. In other words, the choice may not be all chosen. So we'll call that point of possible explanation "second-point-five." Third and lastly, it may just be my body feeling different. I can't deny that the sensations from my body are a huge part of my acting, and in recent years (be it a result of age or injury or what-have-you) I've needed to work more to generate that more-manic energy that drives screwball comedy.

I'd like to find a way in to that energy again for myself. Recently I've responded better to the clown work in part, I think, because it contains built-in silences and a sensitive response. Sure, it can be back-breaking and impulsive, too, but it feels essentially sensitive to me. Screwball is different, and it's something I can do very well. I don't ever want to lose that. In reading

Dan Rice: The Most Famous Man You've Never Heard Of

, I gained a new perspective on how our supposed definitions of high- and low-brow culture came about. As a young nation, we screwed that up pretty good, in my opinion, and have stuck to it. Redeem screwball, friends. Go a little crazy now and then.

Rabbits from Hats

Hwaet:

Zuppa del Giorno

is returning to Italy. Some are flying out as early as the 6th, but I don't depart until the evening of the 8th. We all come flocking home the 21st. In between, we are scheduled to perform at several theatre festivals, thereby offering up our very first solicited original work abroad. It's an incredibly exciting opportunity, and one on which a lot relies. We will get more exposure than ever before, and exposure specifically to theatre artists we want to involve in

In Bocca al Lupo

, and collaborate with on other projects. People will judge us by what we do, and their opinions will dramatically affect our ability to move forward with an international program, be it educational or performing, or both.

And we have no show to perform.

You might suppose that a troupe specializing in improvisatory theatre would relish this situation but, if so, you'd be wrong. Call us nancies, but when this kind of thing is on the line, we generally like to have something pretty tight put together. Then, should circumstances flatter it, we might depart from our show to enjoy a good tangent or two. How do we find ourselves in this particularly awkward position? Well, these trips always seem to pull together at the last of all possible moments, and commitments can be tough to come by. Our intention had always been to somehow resurrect (read: restructure)

Silent Lives

for performance in Italy. Not only do we not have the time nor resources to accomplish that, but one of our numbers has a conflict and can not join the trip. That leaves me and

Friend Heather

to conceive, build and perform an hour-long, wholly original show.

Friend Heather moved to Scranton about a year ago. Which kind of makes me want to smack her right now. (But Heather's always kind of fun to smack, anyways.)

So we've met a total of three times -- repetitions of three being

inherently

funny -- for about four-hours-a-go to develop a show we can perform between the two of us; a show that is not verbally language-based, that is easily transportable and, one hopes, entertaining as all hell. No pressure. Prior to these rehearsals, we collaborated over email a bit, as we are wont to do, unless we actually set up a

blog

or

two

to coordinate multiple input sources (read: folks). I wrote out a strenuously over-involved, quasi-scenario (for three; this was when we thought we still had three with which to work), and Heather wrote back with her version of the same (including such useful responses as, "I'm not sure about the sock puppets..."). After all this, we met in New York to "rehearse," and, as though I hadn't enough to thank her for by now, Heather took the onus of the travel upon her martyred self.

I'll skip to the end a bit here, to say that what we now have is a largely silent clown piece that -- we hope -- should take about 45 minutes to play out, about a couple growing up and old together. How we got there was a good deal different from creative processes Zuppa del Giorno has heretofore engaged in, driven as we were in a unique way by necessity. Heather and I actually have a couple of ideas for independent collaborations together that we discuss whenever we're frustrated with whatever we're supposed to be working on, but none of these ideas could be squoze (is SO a word) into the framework of our festivals. Given our limited time to develop the show, we elected to mine previous material as much as possible. Which, oddly enough, is a very traditional commedia dell'arte thing to do. After four years of working together, we have several lazzi that can be dropped in to whatever we do.

Our first thought was simply to compile all the couples we had played in Zuppa shows (Heather and I are the Burns & Allen of northeastern Pennsylvania) into a kind of review. The trouble with this idea was that most of our couples spoke as part of their characterization, and it didn't provide us with a simple through-line, which is something we knew we'd need. You can pfutz about with conventional narrative, sure, but we have enough problems confronting a language barrier. Eventually, we recognized that the characters we had played could be pretty handily slotted into different stages of life, which reminded us of our conceit of three people growing up together in

Silent Lives

. So when we met, Heather and I immediately started playing with old-couple characters. It was the least-explored aspect of a life-cycle for us thus far. She had recently played an older woman in

Time, Timing, Timeless

, and I had a farcical old man in

Legal Snarls

, but never together and neither with any romantic or quibbling overtones. So a matter of days ago, we met in an aerial acrobatic rehearsal space in Williamsburg and explored.

More to come on this piece as it progresses, but David (Zarko) has already had to title it for submission:

L'amore e' mazzo, ma buona

(

Love is Crazy, But Good

).

Stories about Story Games and their Story-Gamers

Weekend the last, I did it again. I ventured south and stopped in at

Camp Nerdly 2.0

, a role-playing and story-gaming conference that is held annually in NoVa, and which was co-founded by

Expatriate Younce

. You may recall that I attended teh Nerdly for the first time last year (and if'n you don't, see

5/8/07

), which was a somewhat grandiose personal return to gaming in general. I was a D&D geek back in my early teen years, but lost touch with that community as I got older and committed more time to theatre, and other distractions. My best and oldest friends, however, still game regularly. They're good at it. Camp Nerdly is my opportunity to take a little time off from acting to visit them in their world and, uh . . . act.

The breakdown of my time is very nearly a progression from discomfort to comfort. The games I feel most at-home with are, naturally, those more focused on characterization, improvisation and storytelling. The ones I feel like a nerd who's out of polygonal dice in are those in which the emphasis is on . . . well, polygonal dice. And other devices and systems of applied conflict resolution. (Most of the other Nerdlians thrive on these, because they're wicked smart; if a game involves math, I tend to feel as though I'm trying to figure out my taxes.) The first game I played was called

AGON

, and involved a bit of such conflict resolution. Fortunately,

Friend Davey

was there to see me through the 1d12s (if I was lucky) and the interconnectedness of the players' rolls. Thereafter I played

Valkyrie

, a game in "playtest" (in development) that was mainly a team strategy game involving cards and quantity relationships. After that was a brief sojourn into a board warfare-strategy game called

Memoir '44

(the success of which I very much owe to Davey again), and then another playtest, this one for an RPG based on

Hamlet

called, aptly enough,

Something Is Rotten

.

The Upgrade

was my first "jeepform" experience, which is essentially a role-playing game that takes after improvisational theatre, and the last game of the weekend was

Zendo

, a competitive deductive-reasoning game. So by-and-large, I progressed from incapability to comfort, insecurity to confidence. Rather like a rehearsal process.

I'm not sure I had the same profundity of insight this year as I had last, but I attribute that to there being less novelty this time around, less of a surprise in having had a good experience. I did spend some time meditating on the similarities between theatre and gaming, naturally, and found a few ideas that are helpful to both. One unexpected benefit, however, was to spend so much time playing with two old friends in such a way that we were often mentally working hard together. Think about it: When you see your friends, do you more often aim to relax and let go of strategy, or engage in complicated efforts at problem-solving. Both types of activity hold merit. I don't do nearly as much of the latter as I'd like, particularly with my buddies in NoVa.

AGON

is a game set in mythic Greece, in which the players work as a team to complete some kind of mythical mission (think Odysseus), but also to come out on top, as the hero who accumulated the most glory (think Jason ["and the Argonauts," not "Morningstar" {although, you know what--

think him, too

}]). This game was run by

Remi Treuer

, who did a great job creating an engaging story and rolling with unpredictable players, though the mythos got a little bent in the process. (In this world, Kore [Persephone] and her mother apparently had some kind of resentful relationship causing spring weather when she descended to the underworld, and Orpheus was double-timing Eurydice with her.) I was

way

out of my depth with the system (which is relatively simple, but...you know...) but suffered more from having a pretty weak sense of the character I had designed for myself. I had meant for him to be a spy sort, a cunning lurker, and he ended up serving the game best by singing (of all things) most of the time.

In Jason Morningstar's

Valkyrie

, one plays a German dissident during the latter eccentricities of World War II. One does so for as long as one can, I should say, since there is the distinct likelihood that one will be investigated by the SS and summarily executed during the game. In fact, only Friend Davey survived the experience in the same avatar throughout. Again, I was a slow monkey on this system, but I certainly picked it up better than I did

AGON

, and the teamwork appealed to me far more than the blend of teamwork/glory-hounding. Plus the game makes for Nazis killing Nazis. That's, like, the universal equation. In spite of the thrill of succeeding to assassinate Hitler and create an uprising against the Nazi party, the game did ultimately lack much of an involved character-play or storytelling element, at least the way we played it. Not that I necessarily consider that a fault, mind. It was hella fun, and you could do it with a campier crowd than we determined conspiracists.

Thereafter,

Clinton R. Nixon

(whose name I must admit I envy) invited me to play

Memoir '44

, and I had immediate post-traumatic stress over every lost game of

Risk

I ever played. But when Clinton R. Nixon invites you to play something, only fools dare refuse. Let me tell you something:

Risk

is for little jerks who can't figure out the concepts behind checkers. (That'd be me; fortunately, Friend Davey was there with his able strategisms once again.) The best part about

Memoir '44

is the way it weaves chance into strategy through its use of randomly drawn cards for available actions. I'm buying it. End o' story. (Though I may go for one of the less based-on-actual-human-tragedy varieties. So now: True end o' story.)

Kevin Allen Jr. is featured in ma' 'blogroll. If you've never yet been to

The Mountaintop Lair of Alex Trebek

, go immediately, and once there, shave your head in devotion. It. Is. A. DELIGHT. (If you're an utterly cynical geek [which I is].) I met him at Nerdly the First, and when I saw he was running a game that was a "hack" of

Hamlet

, I knew I had at least one time-slot permanently filled.

Something Is Rotten

was very much in playtest, so half of our time was spent in (fascinating) discussion of how to make it operate better as a game. There was actually some confusion on my part as to whether Kevin was aiming to actually make a game, or rather use gaming to gather ideas for a story he wanted to write. It hardly mattered. The playing was great fun for me, weaving in references to the play some times, and at others completely disregarding conventional concepts of the characters. For example, when I played the Hamlet-type, he was outwardly angry with the Claudius-type, something he could never do in the play. And at one point I jumped in as a yokel waiter in a diner, spreading the rumor that the circus (or, the players) were coming to town. I walked away renewed in my enthusiasm for the idea of blending improvisational theatre -- audience and all -- with gaming, which has been a topic of much musing 'twixt Youncey and me.

The Upgrade

continued the trend of the improvisational, though this with less of a story-telling aspect, and more of an emotional and status-combat interplay. Clinton and Jason (Jason had also been in on playing

Something Is Rotten

, which naturally ruled) ran this game, which is modeled after reality TV, specifically shows that involve couple-swapping. The game is considered a "

jeepform

" one, which is a Finnish style of game that has the most in common out of any game I've ever played with the sort of long-form improvisation that

Second City

is famous for. J and C were assisted in the running by a couple of more experienced "jeepformers" by the names of

Emily Boss

and

Epidiah Ravachol

, who played ancillary characters and offered great perspective on how the game went when all was said and done. I could go on and on about this game, but the most significant experience of it for me was how uninvolved I made myself. This was owing to being AMAZED at what I was witnessing. Over the course of a couple of hours, I watched a large group of non-actors progress at amazing speed through stages of development as improvisational actors. By the end, something amazing had happened. People were no longer chasing punchlines, but feeling involved in their characters' struggles. We had a group scene with six people in it and boisterous action throughout, and as if by magic, everyone managed to pass the focus without interrupting, overlapping or lagging the action of the scene. DO YOU HAVE ANY CONCEPT OF HOW DIFFICULT THIS IS? I'm still reviewing the events in my head. I'm sifting through cause-and-effect, and believe I'm heading toward the conclusion that a relatively non-competitive game environment, if nurtured and given its own time, promotes communication. Profoundly. More on this . . . well, for the rest of my life.

My Nerdly excursion ended with

Zendo

, and that was fine. A little anticlimactic, but challenging and fun. It was interesting: Davey and Mark and I were planning to sort of huddle to ourselves over this (or another) game. But people became interested. By the end, there were some eight-to-ten people playing or watching (mostly playing), who had been drawn in by the camaraderie. My initial impulse was to resist this, to stick with the monkeys the scent of whose poop I recognized. But we're not monkeys, and Nerdly is all about making those new connections through games and teamwork. It seemed to me this year, for whatever reason, that Nerdly was less well-attended than last. That's problematic for me, because it's an event that is fun, cheap, accepting, beneficial and, ultimately, important. You can develop and expose your game there, you can meet new friends, etc. But what's really unique and important about Camp Nerdly is the way it improves seemingly everyone who attends. Everyone grows, opens up a bit, and learns. Never mind that it happens through gaming. Or, rather, take note. Games are good for you. I want to make Camp Nerdly live, and next year, if I don't have a career obligation that irrevocably conflicts, I'm going to run a game there.

More about it down the line. My thoughts about gaming as it applies to theatre require their own entry.