The First Letter of Darby to the New Mexicans

Riding the rails is a real kick in the pants.

You leap on board this hulking amalgamation of metal weighing tons and tons and tons,
and you take off
across the great American wilderness
on the back of a giant steel dragon.
And once you get over the fear,
there is giddy abandon
at the blind, happy stupidity of what you just did.

Whole cities
are cut in half
while the dragon rattles and smashes through / And you stop
for nothing.
There is no uncertainty
in her relentless, inevitable rhythm.
Wheels beat down on the ribbons of steel
and your own little heartbeat is completely
obliterated.
There is only the train and your skin tasting wind.

Freight trains are the best way to see america.

---

from eulogy for a freight train

objectives

SOTC’s long run has taught me this: all that stuff they teach you in school about objectives and tactics isn’t designed for school. it’s designed for performance. in a six show run over two weeks, you don’t in point of fact actually need specificity. adrenalin kicks in and gives you many of the things most useful to an actor: commitment, energy, focus, and so on.

but doing the show for the 25th time, say, adrenalin sort of starts to run out. and if at that point you don’t have something to do, then you’re fucked.

so this is one way in which mamet is totally right in his book, true and false. he says something like this:

the demands of the live theatre have nothing to do with the demands of theatre school.

true enough, in its way. i don’t follow mamet to his conclusion from this observation, which is to stay out of school, in part because the schooling i got in school wasn’t really designed for my benefit in school, either. it was designed for the live theatre. a paradox, mamet. by and for professionals was a lot of my training. a benefit of working so heavily with actors instead of teachers. the training they gave me was designed for practical application in the live theatre; i just didn’t get a lot of it at the time.

the thing about objectives is that they’re dependable. you can continually go back to them and refine them. and it’s hard to learn to depend on things that you don’t actually need to depend on. instead you lern to depend on adrenalin, and that’s death to you when you have a long run. and you do need to refine from time to time – at some point you just get bored with the same tactics, and they no longer mean anything to you. and that’s where you can change up your personalizations, your images, your tactics, and so on.

7.06

7.06

ups and downs.

personal:
down: a shitty month.

a word of advice to straight people out there: provincteown is a hard town to get on in. it gives you a lot of sympathy for the alienation that comes with being gay everywhere else. also, the tourists. apparently we’re allowed to hate them once august hits. that’s the rule, i guess.

i’ve kept up, with a couple of breaks, my ridiculously regimented schedule (up 6:30, two eggs, gym, work, shakespeare, bed at 11:00), and it’s had a hermiting effect. even though i stopped not drinking, i seem to have managed pretty well to cut myself off from all human contact. i’m working on that, but it’s provided some shall we say uncomfortable revelations about some of my relationships.

i’ve been worrying a lot about the apocalypse approaching. prophetic fear of the frighteningly obvious? bourgeois indulgence indicative of a more personal crisis? who knows. it just seems so obvious on so many levels that we are completely fucked if we don’t have a really seriously major turnaround in the way that we produce and consume material goods. then i saw inconvenient truth, and that certainly didn’t help. and here we are living in these incredible times with all these nifty gadgets and awesome power. i’ve been using the phrase pre-apocalyptic bohemian, but my brother gave me the word i was looking for: babylonian.

picked up a lot of bikery skills, and i feel like i’d be qualified now actually as a bike mechanic in a city. that’s exciting. could be useful when the apocalypse rolls in.

professional:
up: a great month.

reviews have repeatedly been good, though i haven’t read them all. one line: Samuel Taylor [...] has a real set of Shakespearean “pipes” … My voice, kids, is too big for the theater. har har, that’s an inside joke. audiences have been wildly variable, from eighty to five, with little seeming pattern. we performed As You Like It in Wellfleet for five old people. -and boy was it ever educational. there was some question as to whether we were going to do the show at all. one man settled that question handily by saying: let me put it to you this way. i’m eighty two years old. i chose to spend a night of my life with you. i’d like to see the show. it was great, really. nothing like performing for five people to keep you honest.

touring kicking off in earnest now – only two more weeks of shows in ptown. last week woods hole, this week nantucket, then harwich, and at last the G.

a handful of professional type people have come to our shows and tried to involve the company in various other projects – a tenessee williams play, readings of scripts, and so on. that’s fun, but means nothing to me in concrete terms. a director i auditioned for last may, rumor had it i was in consideration and maybe there’d be another round of callbacks. he’ll be directing the tennessee williams.

two options of plans, assuming i don’t get the aforementioned gig, have begun to take shape: go back to albuquerque, gallivant around for a while, possibly in central america, hang out with tricklock for revolutions, and move up to chicago sometime maybe march. the other plan is to go straight to chicago.

political:
keep your eye on the fallout of ned lamont versus joseph lieberman, the primary election showdown of millenial democrats versus the 90s boys, which election takes place tomorrow the eighth. ned’s probably going to win, and then all hell will break loose in the democratic party. i’d like to think it was my 25 bucks that put him over the edge. put your candidate over the edge in november with yours. they need your money now. you’ll feel good.

update: lieberman conceded the race, and is going to run as an independant. call your democratic senators and tell them to strip lieberman of all of his committee appointments and publicly back the democratic party’s choice in connecticut: ned lamont.  i’ll post thoughts on the aftermath of this race soon.