@#!$$%&!?! Play FINISHED!!!

Did you hear me, Jasper? FINITO. Yep, you heard me. INTO CLEAR DARKNESS, my light, frothy epic about dead Russian poets and a cynical Toronto writer with AIDS, is finally, fait accompli. And after only ten years and a minimal amount of bloodshed besides. It still has some technical tweaking and cutting to go, but structurally (who lives, who dies, who gets laid) it's at last in place.

After several months (nay, some would say YEARS) of finally taking this beast and rewriting it a) into another font format, b) excising, slashing and burning and REWRITING, it appears to be just about DONE. The hard part, of getting it into its current format is finished. Now that I have a COMPLETE hard copy, I will sit up for the next week or so, with red pen in hand, and heavily brandied tea in the other, and go through it all over again. What’s that you say? You’re doing MORE? How can this be? You said it was finished! Oh, you sweet naïve young chickadees. As my sage mentor George Rideout used to say, “A new play is never finished being written until opening night.” Which is, unfortunately, true, as you have to get through rehearsals, and discover what the director likes and doesn’t like, what the actors can actually say without passing out from lack of oxygen, and just what sounds horrible when its said aloud. THAT has yet to begin. George also noted (albeit very tactfully) that I HATED rewriting, which is also true, but like dental exams, I have learned to grin and bear it. Its actually become easier the more I do it. Its when I look at a scene that doesn’t work, and am stuck as to what to do with it, that I start pulling my hair out of my head and yowling like one of the Scottish play’s witches.

(I actually do that at work the first week of every month, but they’re used to it now. “What’s that dreadful howling?” “Oh nothing. Its just Trev, sorting through the timesheets. Hand me that coffee cup, will you?”)

Nevertheless, its been an ordeal. The original first draft I had done in 2000. Ever since then, through myriad readings and the whatnot, I have fought with it, struggled with it, thrown it away, hauled it back again, killed people off, brought them back to life, and generally just stewed over it like a chancre, or an ulcerated wound that wouldn’t go away. I don't know how God does it, I really don't.

I wrote other plays, but always came back to this one. It was structurally flawed I knew, but how I didn’t know. Then I figured it out. Or at least I think I have. I'm not gonna tell you, you're just gonna have to come and see the play. So now, I’m going back through this clean copy, and I’m going to cut away all the dead wood, and see how sleek I can make it. I don’t want any fat on the bones. Its like Faukner said, “you have to go back and kill all your darlings” when writing. I don’t think I have that many left, but there may be a few….at any rate, tonight I shall sit down and have at it! And when THAT'S done, I shall make another clean copy, with the new set of revisions, and then, that's it. But from here on in, its just excess removal. No more rewriting. Just tweaking and cleaning.

FINISHED.

Good Queen's Bess' 448th Ascension Revel.....

From left to right; Scotty, me, Peter and Clinton

Well, you see, it started like this. I wanted to have a party, and Thanksgiving was past, and it was too early for Christmas. I knew the date I wanted to have my little shindig, as I was housesitting at the esteemed A.Gordon's place, and thought, "Hmmm. What holiday or festive event happened on the seventeenth of November?" So I looked it up and found that Queen Elizabeth I, the Virgin Queen herself, had her coronation some 448 years ago in 1558, at the ripe old age of twenty-five. That seemed reason enough to have a party. After all, they celebrated her ascension to the throne every year of her reign, and even did so a dozen years after she died!

The timing seemed perfect. I was steeped in Elizabethan reading, as I was doing research on Christopher Marlowe for something I wanted to write about him. My mind was already in the era, so all seemed perfect. I invited everybody I wanted to invite, that is to say, everybody I found fun and enjoyable to be with. I never invite people for political reasons, the way I see so many others do. I invite whom I like. Period. And a lot of them came, which was delightful. Aside from a lot of pretenders to the throne, there was only one real queen that night, and she was asleep in her armchair by the fire, oblivious to everything. (Well, there was another Queen there that night in spirit, but she was busy drinking wine in France....)

At any rate, it was a lovely evening with all sorts of people there, all the ones I love to hang out with and laugh with, and it dawned on me again, how lucky I was to have a such a fabulous bunch of friends. Not even Good Queen Bess could claim that.

That Scarlett Woman...

My friend Scott has the most remarkable DVD collection and he has TONNES of good stuff (the man is like a lending library with his DVDs, God bless him) and chief amongst this was the Tennessee Williams collection. Of the five movies I had seen in this particular collection, I particularly wanted to watch A Streetcar Named Desire again. I had discovered it in high school on late night TV and had immediately become obsessed with it. Particularly did I become enamoured with the extraordinary performance of Vivien Leigh as Blanche Dubois.

Forever remembered for Scarlett O'Hara and later on, Blanche, she struck a mark in film history and became an icon. What is surprising is that Leigh only made 19 films in her career, from one line bit parts to historic leads. Certainly not all of them were great, in fact, a lot of them were terrible, but she was memorable in all of them. She was basically a stage actress who did part-time work as a major movie star. Despite the variety of her roles, she was primarily a classical stage actress. She played most of the great Shakespearean women's roles, and was judged by no less than John Gielgud and Laurence Olivier respectively to be the best Cleopatra and Lady Macbeth they ever saw. This was surprising, because from the beginning, she had a lot stacked against her. Her looks, her voice and her inexperience all weighed heavily against her. It was only through her own formidable will and faith in herself that she succeeded at all, against incredible odds, and some would say, at a devastating cost.

When she first started out in her career, she was a young married mother who did part-time modelling work. As an actress she had little or no experience, and she had a weak chest with poor projection, and a very light, silly, piping schoolgirl voice that did not bode well for working on the stage, much less in the classical theatre. But for over thirty odd years she worked, studied, trained and knocked herself out to not only strengthen her voice but deepen her characterizations as well.

When one watches her in a truly silly film like, 21 Days Together and listens to her trilling, (almost shrill) tones in her heavy Mayfair accent, one is amazed at the transformation in pitch, depth and power she attains not even a dozen years later in Streetcar. Her heart-wrenching plea of "Don't turn the light on!" to Mitch is the agonized squawk of a woman caught in a painful legtrap. There is nothing dignified in her voice in that moment, but there is transcendant truth in its raw, animal agony. It is painful to listen to because the dignity of tragedy has been stripped out of her voice. It is the sheer desperate madness and panic of a woman drowning in lies.

The story of Leigh's success, and ultimately the tragedy of her life has been told many times, but it still belies the fact that this woman who suffered most of her adult life from recurringly severe physical and mental illness never stopped striving or learning. She worked extremely hard to fulfill her ambition to succeed as an actress. Except for periods of illness, she never stopped working, nor did she stop pushing herself to excel. At the age of fifty she starred on Broadway in a musical, and won a Tony award for Best Actress. Except for a few moments on film, she had never sung before. I have heard a few snippets of the songs, and I was amazed at how well she sang, yes, sang, in a perfectly believable Russian accent.

The irony of all this great success was that she was not a great actress when she started out by any means. She had though, as Laurence Olivier observed, "the most perturbing attraction" he had ever encountered. Charisma coupled with a breathtaking beauty, she was instantly noticeable, and she used that notoriety to get herself work. Sensibly she realized her shortcomings and worked to overcome them, determined to become as she once put it, "a great actress". She gallantly tried to live down her looks for the rest of her career, and hated nothing more than to be told how pretty and beautiful she was. She felt it was a decorative compliment, having no intrinsic value and having nothing to do with how hard she had worked to attain the respect that she finally did achieve. Her partnership with Olivier brought her to dizzying heights of success, but while she was a phenomenally good actress equally comparable if not superior to many of her peers, Olivier was simply a genius onstage, with vocal power and physicality to spare. She could not hope to compete, even if she had been physically strong and healthy enough to do so. Alas, without meaning to, his genius eclipsed his wife's own stellar talent, as it would so often eclipse so many others, and in time, she lost a sense of her own worth as an actress. As a friend aptly described their partnership together, "the engine that drove her work, drove just as strongly as his did, but ultimately, his was the bigger engine."

Thus one can only imagine her frustration when, at the height of her partnership onstage with her husband, she would hear compliments to the both of them along the lines of, "You are the best actor in the world, and you are the most beautiful woman in the world." For a woman who was known to best none other than Noel Coward at word games, who spoke at least five languages fluently and frequently dubbed her own films, who was known to be a shrewd collector of art and an avid bibliophile (she read the entire Dickens canon during the war and wrote a well received review on a biography of Emma Hamilton) the humiliation of being dismissed as a merely decorative beauty in the shadow of her husband's genius must have been intense.

She only made three films after Streetcar, none of them very good, but all of them fascinating viewing in terms of the performances she gave. In each she pushed the depths she had plumbed as Blanche, and her later maturity gave her a ravaged gusto, a fierce, freeing, almost ugly quality that would have been unthinkable in her as a young woman. These films are worth viewing as curiousities, but as Hugo Vickers, her best biographer once said, it is in Streetcar that her heart and soul survives. Viewing her work in this film is to witness the hard work of a sensitive artist, and yes, as Vivien would have hoped, a great actress.

La TREViata....

Picture courtesy of MGM

I get irritable when I have a cold, or get sick. Most people do, unless of course, you’re one of those weird people who get off on any kind of suffering, in which case being sick is as welcome as a free night on the town for two. You know the kind of people I mean, they’d get irritable if they WEREN’T sick because then they’d have nothing to complain about. I don’t like being sick. And I don’t like being depressed. When I get hit with both afflictions, my inclination is to hibernate until I get better, because as I see it, if I’m not fit to breathe around you without putting you at risk, then I shouldn’t be around people. Period. In the last week, I’ve had to cancel out on three dinners, a Halloween party and a brief visit home because of this horrible, wracking cough.

Depression, although radically different, I treat pretty much the same way. I’m not mentally fit company when I’m in the throes of battling the drear. I get snappish and irritable, and everything around me, good or ill, plagues me unendurably. Whatever tact I have vanishes, I become combative and destructive and cutting in my opinions, and I get mean. Which is inexcusable. So I stay away from people, even those I adore for fear of sinking my fangs into the fleshiest part of their legs. Its just better that way. People don’t walk away from me dazed and psychically scarred, and my reputation doesn’t suffer the accusation of having an ingrown disposition. I haven’t had a spell of that in awhile so that’s a blessing. Knock wood. Indeed, I’ve actually been in great spirits as of late, its just physically I’ve been falling apart. Seriously, I sound like the last act of LA TRAVIATA or CAMILLE. Except I’m not Garbo, and Robert Taylor’s nowhere in sight. Aside from that, and the conspicuous absence of any MGM soundstages, me and that consumptive French hooker could be twins!

I wonder if Marguerite Gauthier got tetchy when Armand was following her around, calf-eyed, while she was busy coughing up a lung into her handkerchief. I’d have slapped the brat and told him to go do something useful, like vacuuming the carriage, or helping the maid clean out the chamber pots or something….

Sigh. I wouldn’t have coped well in the 19th century methinks….

Doogie's GAY?!? Who Knew?

I imagine somebody did. I certainly didn't, although now that I think about it, that Will and Grace episode where he played a member of an ex-Gay group trying to make Jack straight did have a rather ironic quality to it. Oh well, good for him. Chad Allen, Robert Gant, T.R.Knight, and of course Nathan Lane, Stephen Fry, Simon Callow, Harvey Fierstein, Rupert Everett, and Sir Ian McKellen are just some of the brave souls out there, proving that who they are in their private lives doesn't affect the integrity of their work. And now Doogie's joined them. Bravo! Or is that Brava?!? Hee! Now if only a few more big time A-list actors would kick open that closet door, then we'd REALLY see some progress...



Picture courtesy of Wikimedia