Pre-Production, The Reading, and Early Rehearsals

"Tonight we fly like ravens to feast on Roman bones."

There is a marvelous moment in the 1951 version of Quo Vadis where Nero, played by Peter Ustinov, calls for his "weeping vase" while the city burns. He is shedding "another tear for Rome." The implication being, perhaps, his divine tears are worthy of preserving even if the city itself is not. 

It's such an eccentric performance and such a funny moment I've never forgotten it, and when it came time to do a play about ancient Rome, the title was waiting. Many years ago, back in Brooklyn, I set out to complete a "Pulp Cycle" of plays, with a script for each famous genre of B-Films. 

It's ongoing, though I've made great progress.  In the last twelve years, we've done a jungle play, a retro sci-fi play, several war plays (with talking animals and a radioactive Dutch woman), a crime-fighting magician play, a fantasy play, a drugsploitation play, a women in prison play (though the women were witches), and more. 

Live! On! Stage!  

So, this is the "swords and sandals" play. 

Over the last twelve years, I've been very fortunate to have worked with troupes in Brooklyn and Seattle and maintained a roster continuity full of fools willing to subject themselves to various humiliations on stage and in the booth. They keep coming back for more. It's been a great privilege to have had the opportunity to get these up and a marvel, still, that people have come to see them and have roared at the appropriate moments. 

For many years I had a corporate gig, and I was able to balance work and creativity feeling that if the job was rough I could say, "well, at least I'm an artist," and if the play was going rough, I could say, "well, at least I have a good job." But I have left the job and Another Tear for Rome will have the benefit or curse of my undivided attention. 

It will need it, since the script requires almost twenty roles. It's a sprawling, ridiculous mess and representative of why we're called No Refunds Productions. 

In the early days, the joke was if we couldn't afford materials or didn't have the skill to create a set piece, we would "make it out of girls," and thus we had dancing waterfalls and clouds with tap shoes. In that spirit, Another Tear will feature living columns. Costumed to resemble caryatids, they'll be the furniture and define the different settings by their position on stage. They sing sometimes. 

It's something I've wanted to do for a long time. 

I went into the writing process with the title and the column concept, and I went from there. I took inspiration from Quo Vadis, one of the folk tales from The Left Hand of Darkness, a New Yorker article about phantom limb syndrome, I, Claudius, and countless junk novels, garbage movies, and personal anecdotes.

It came together in pieces assembled slowly over time, starting off as notes and a brief scene or two, began to congeal in a cabin in Whitefish, Montana, and then came squalling at last to life in three painful days of focus back home in Seattle. One morning near the end I woke up before the baristas and had to walk to a distant diner. At 5am, the place was populated with club bouncers who hadn't been to bed yet and construction workers tanking up for a long day of selfies on suspended I-Beams. (I supposed)

I took some inspiration from them as well, and the rough script was ready. We had a massive reading at the apartment where we discovered how well ginger snaps pair with goat's cheese, and I got great feedback from the places where the actors laughed and better feedback from where they did not. 

Then I flew to Rome and edited it, because I was free to do so. And I thought it would make a good story. 

The edits in The Eternal City included several character name-changes inspired by words I learned there and felt drawn to. 

Casting has been smoother than I deserve. It's an "off-season" play, so most of the gang is available, and the actor playing the Caligula analogue does so much work he has a Colosseum-sized rolodex. And thus, we were able to quickly assemble a group of dancers, acrobats, and unhanged murderers to fill the stage. 

At the first production meeting, I asked the cast to watch I, Claudius, and I'm already getting feedback that it is boring, which is cracking me up for some reason. It does start off slow. But they had eleven hours to tell their story. We have ninety minutes. 

Over the next few weeks I'm going to try and record some of the challenges, surprises, karaoke mistakes, and happy accidents that manifest during production. We open in two and a half months, which should be enough time, but... I've never done a show where we weren't sewing someone into something as they were walking on stage for Opening Night. 

I hope to use this blog to discuss the characters and some of the plot issues we need to solve. It should be a fun peek behind the scenes and a record of the process. I've never done a production diary before, but this time I'm free to do so. 

And I thought it would make a good story.