Floods, Feedback and Fringe

The Skywriter team, writing down their thoughts after the reading.

Wednesday night, June 3, 7pm EST found me with my friend and director, Hunter, crouching in a Popeye's on H Street NE, glumly contemplating the buckets of rain and crossfire of hail separating us from the Atlas Theatre and our final workshop reading of Skywriter. The Atlas, current headquarters of the good folk at Artists' Bloc, was just across the street from us, but said street had a roughly 3-foot-wide strip of asphalt, dead center, that wasn't covered with raging floodwaters. After much mutual encouragement, Hunter and I, like Butch and Sundance, gathered our courage and leaped out of the Popeye's and into the elements, which promptly pummeled us and left us smelling like mildew for the remainder of the evening.

Apart from our inauspicious entrance, the reading couldn't have gone better. This was the third in a series of workshop readings we set up with Artists' Bloc, an outfit run by our friends Colin and Roy that dedicates itself exclusively to helping artists develop new work. We did our first reading in April, with just the cast, designers, and Colin gathered around a table in the Atlas's basement. In early May, I produced a new draft based on feedback from the previous session and we read that at the Warehouse Theatre in Chinatown. Armed with input from that session, I made additional tweaks and came up with the latest, greatest, admittedly somewhat sodden new draft of the play that we were going to read through on Wednesday night. Then I'd have just under two weeks to revise before laying down my pen with the beginning of rehearsals.

We review some changes to the final scene before opening the house.

In the hour before the house opened, we reviewed and revisited new moments in the draft while eating waterlogged hamburgers and french fries that our stage manager, Marissa, resourcefully picked up at Checkers to sustain hungry actors and staff. Then we sent the cast to their perches behind the music stands, opened the doors, and ushered in the souls who had braved the deluge.

After hearing the extent to which Chris, Ricardo, Genevieve and Lynn have grown into their roles already in the space of a few readings, I can only giggle with anticipation at how Hunter and the cast will continue to build up the characters and the world of the show in the next few weeks of rehearsal. If you weren't among the few to attend the readings, you'll just have to come to the Shop at Fort Fringe to see one of our performances on Saturday, July 11 at 1:30 pm, Sunday, July 12 at 3:15 pm, Saturday, July 18 at 9:30 pm, Saturday, July 25 at 9:00 pm, and Sunday, July 26 at 4:45 pm. Tickets go on sale at www.capfringe.org or by calling 1-866-811-4111 starting June 22!

Colin (right) and me (left) pondering what looks like a doozy of a question
during the talkback session following the reading.

Rehearsals commence this Tuesday, and I hope to blog more then. For now, I'll leave you with one last example of why Artists' Bloc is awesome and we should support them. After the reading and talkback session, Roy, the Managing Director of Artists' Bloc, comes up to me.

"I figured I'd wait to tell you this one-on-one, because it's a little thing," he says. "At one point you have a character putting a roll of quarters in his fist during a fight. In real life, if you punch someone while holding a roll of quarters, you'll break every bone in your hand."

Roy pauses to let this sink in, and I ponder how he knows this and whether I should be, like, way more deferential towards Roy in the future.

"Have him use a roll of dimes," he concludes.

"Roy," I say, "We need to hang out more."