Saturday

Found this one-act, two-person play, that I want to do.  Strong writing, interesting characters.  Haven't a clue how to go about doing it anywhere without a company.  I did start a conversation about it with someone that runs a small company/space.  I need to follow-up with him.  A friend offered to shoot head shots...I need to follow-up with that as well.

Saw two shows today, left early from the second one because I felt like I was getting a sinus infection.  Lots of chaos on the streets as I was trying to get home.  (Took almost two hours to get home, suppose I could've actually stayed for the second show at later venue.)  Not sure what was up with that.  At one point I asked a man who was restraining a woman (really was for her own good, she was totally off her rocker and throwing kicks and punches and racial epithets at people, as well as running screaming into traffic) if she was alright, he replied something about her going to prison.  He must have meant jail: apparently she decked someone.  Maybe they just ended up taking her to detox.

Earlier in the day I'd gone to see Seattle Shakespeare's Othello.  It's a play I'm not crazy about (have seen some very dull, drawn out productions of it), had thought about trying to see if I could exchange the tickets for a different show (I'd won two gift certificates at a Freehold faculty event).  In the end, I'm glad I went.  Fantastic.  Super strong cast, bold directing choices (John Langs), and a hard-driving story line, all of which made it engaging.  Darragh Kennan as Iago was probably the best role I've seen him in, the man nails both the character and the language.  Sean Phillips as Othello, Quinn Franzen as Cassio, Trick Danneker as Roderigo, and Keiko Green as Bianca (for her brief time in that role) were all excellent.  Hillary Clemens as Desdemona and Alexandra Tavares as Emilia just kicked it up in the second half, for the first, I was wondering how she deals emotionally (as an actress, I wondered about that with Ryan Higgins in Live from the Last Night of My Life, as well) with what was asked of her (from the bath to her final breath) and the latter moved me to tears throughout the last act with her impassioned pleas to Othello and loyalty to Desdemona.

From the opening wedding ritual full of a sense of peace and love and all being right in the world, to the final scene and the bodies of the four main characters strewn on the stage, the lean story telling (carried through the schemes and words of Iago) narrowed all possibilities until there was only one inevitable destructive end.

So well done.