RAT The Texture of Touring

[The Independent Eye <bards@independenteye.org>]

Dear Friends-

Thought this might be of interest to some of y'all.  Modified from a "we're home!" letter I wrote to a bunch of friends, and doesn't really have overwhelming intellectual value; but sometimes it's interesting to have a window into some of the more off-beat corners of this strange art form.  Elizabeth and I (now 59 and 61 yrs old) have earned our living in small-scale independent theatre for the past 30 years, mostly through touring, and while no two tours are alike, this gives something of the texture of it.  We've done  work in other venues - though never chanced on that court performance for Louis XIV that might have made us big names - but still gravitate to this edge of the theatre world as our home.  Expecting to work very hard for one of us, at least, to attend the RAT conference in Philly.

***

	We set out from Sebastopol, CA, on January 8th, after two full days of packing the van, hauling out at 2 a.m.  We had good weather along I-80, slept in truckstops - even with three shows packed in Sheba (our van), we had sleeping space.  Arrived early Saturday, Jan. 13, in Corry, a tiny town in NE Pennsylvania, where we performed HITCHHIKING OFF THE MAP for a small arts series in a parish hall - about 90 mostly elderly people, who ate potluck and then watched this peculiar show, and loved it.  A wonderful evening with our hosts, a couple who run a kitchen-design contracting business, talking about life, spirituality and music, deep into the night.

Next day, across the state to Huntingdon, PA, and checked into our quarters at Juniata College for the next five weeks.  A spacious apartment in the college's guest house, just a few minutes' walk from dining hall, library and theatre, where we commenced the creation of REALISTS.  We'd arrived with a first draft, which the cast of 12 students never saw.  Instead, we began improvising scenes with them, rewriting based on the improvs, and staging the very complex, two-hour science fiction chronicle play.  The cast had not much training, but a huge amount of heart, guts and individuality, and working with them was a joy.  Existence was pretty monastic - not a lot of social life in Huntingdon; and besides writing and directing the show, I was scouring the 30-mile radius for props and costumes while Elizabeth whacked at the keyboard of our Power Mac in the corner of our living room, composing a beautiful sound/music score for the show.  Dining hall food was occasionally mitigated by Elizabeth crawling from keyboard to kitchen, stir-frying some real food and composing huge tubs of salad, including a great feed for the cast - we like to start rehearsal spans with a meal - an important sort of ritual bonding.

Rehearsals were interrupted by one performance of MATING CRIES at a PSU campus in Mont Alto, about two hours away - had to pull half of one show out of the van to dig out the other.  Good audience, great response.  And then another late evening drinking and talking with our hostess, a rich-textured campus librarian.  These small-town people are definitely corrupting us.   

Lost about a week of rehearsal with half the cast dead on their feet with the flu, but REALISTS emerged as a hit.  It's a long, rambling piece, and will undergo yet another rewrite before we start sending it to other theatres, but the spine is there, along with a wondrous menagerie of characters.  Some time back, I told someone that at this stage of my life, I was starting to learn to love people as much as I did my characters, and that's true, but I still reserve a large part of my heart for these fictional creatures.

REALISTS opened Feb. 15-17, and on the 18th we hauled out our debris from the apartment, stuffed things back in the van in a wild higgledy-piggledy manner, and set out toward the next high hurdle of the sprint - the first performance of our myth play DESCENT OF INANNA since its run in Philadelphia a year and a half ago.  Arts series at Wichita State University.  What's gonna happen to the Goddess in Kansas?

We'd been working on the play during this whole span, but the rehearsals only made it more difficult, as we found more and more things we wanted to change.  We wound up doing radical revisions ot the text, the set, the music score, and the costuming - in the midst of our move West, building a new show, renovating our studio, etc. - the result being that when we set out from Sebastopol we had a very complex piece and no way to rehearse it for six weeks, plus a long list of tech and composition work.  So after opening one new show on Feb. 15, we opened what was virtually a second new production on Feb. 24. 

It worked.  Our theatre dept. hosts were wonderful, and we got a great charge from the workshops (improvisation & mask work) we did there.  And the tech crew of the arts center was immensely generous with their time.  So we actually had time to rehearse, and on Saturday morning did a full tech runthru, on Saturday afternoon, a dress rehearsal, and on Saturday evening the show.    Abut 250+ audience, very strong response. Not without glitches.  We'd revised our free-standing black acrylic panels, and on two occasions, in dim transition light, I ran squarely into the panels - unable to distingush black reflective plastic from black non-reflective reality, and bulldozed a portion of the set into rubble.  But that seemed not to matter.  Maybe they just thought we were creatively insane, or that it was intentional, but they seemed mesmerized throughout.

And I have to say that after doing this stuff for 40 years, I'm finally beginning to feel that I know something about acting.  That is, the kind of acting that flows immediately through the instinctual body, that goes beyond what you've carefully thought out.  Each performance for us is becoming a discovery, a transformational act, as intimate and spontaneous as the best sex.  And somehow that energy communicates. 

Sunday morning, still dead tired, we struck and loaded out, managed to repack the van, miraculously, again to allow sleeping space.  Then went with Art, the Wichita stage manager, to a Chinese buffet, gorged on food and talk of our life paths and animal healing with Arkansas folk magic - for some reason, we rarely wind up talking about theatre.

Then headed out Sunday late afternoon, across Kansas and Colorado, into southern Utah.  Ran into fog , then snow flurries for the first time, and slept in a truck stop in Salina, Utah.  Woke up at 6:30 a.m., drove out in nasty, nasty weather.  And then it cleared, and the drive on Rt. 50 through the low, chewed-ragged mountains of central Nevada, barren road, basin & range, was spectacular.

And now we're home.  Arrived late Tuesday, built a fire in the fireplace, and said hello.  Next morning, a visit from an old friend, a Philadelphia folksinger who's doing a concert near Santa Cruz, then to the beach to eat sushi and watch the surf.  

And so what now?

Reconnection with friends who are here.  Writing to friends who aren't.  Finishing work on our studio.  In two weeks I go to Phoenix for a theatre visit for the NEA, week after that to a radio conference, and at the end of March we fly back for four days work in NJ, with some side trips at last to see friends.  Then home, and in May a three-week run of HITCHHIKING locally.  Starting work on the final draft of REALISTS, and also a novel.  And we're starting on two other books, BARDIC THEATRE, aimed at theatre practitioners, and describing the experience & methods of our own performance - work that's directly the creation of the performer, that transmutes through many performance styles but always with a direct storytelling spine.  And MAGICKAL ACTING, which will be geared mostly toward a Pagan market, applying our approach to acting and dramatic creation to its use for ritual, community-building, and spiritual exploration.  If we can begin to generate some noticeable money from writing, maybe we can stay home more.

Next official act will be to update our wall calendar.  Then to refill the hot tub.  Then the rest of life.

Cheers-
Conrad Bishop





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