I love that phrase, Steve. Famous to fifteen people sounds so intimate, like readings I've done in small bookstores, to small groups. I mean maybe four people. Interesting reversal of meaning. Intimate via the web means intimate on a basis other than physical (which connotes presence to me). A cyberspace version of intimacy. Although these conversations develop in different spaces and at different times, they seem continuous. The interactivity, the democratization of media you refer to, is also independent of time and space. I like it that the internet makes it possible for people to know about what's happening in various parts of the world without relying on corporate sources, but I don't know what I think about the "absence" issue. I mean absence versus presence. It's something I'm mulling over and may use in a new play.
I think I mentioned that a professional workshop had been arranged for the play I've been working on, Casting the Angel. After living with the characters and the script for a couple of years, I was really anxious to see how it came off the page. The workshop is a development tool and a first step towards production. I see they have a similar program at Cherry Lane Theatre in the West Village, and probably many other theatres. The director of the Playwright's Theatre Centre chose great actors to read the parts in my play, and I worried that it might not be up to their talents. But the reading turned out just great. I was high for a week or so afterwards. There's a wonderful sense of communion a writer feels, at least I feel, when words, characters I've invented are spoken, embodied by someone else, an actor. I hadn't felt that since my radio play days and I love it. Since my characters are actors, the actors playing them really got into it and seemed to really like the script. I had not anticipated the synergy of the match of actor to actor-character. Now for more revisions and a move closer towards production.
Plays take place in present time, in an actual space, unlike web communication. But the thought of different spaces reminds me that you've been part of those masses of humans walking to work because the transit workers are on strike. When something like this happens in NY, it seems bigger than if elsewhere because of the numbers of people and the iconic images, such as the Brooklyn Bridge, that are part of the story. While you were coping with the inconvenience, yet possibly also the mass exhileration that comes from a shared experience, I was negotiating icy hills and roads at Manning Provincial Park, where I took my little family - Elisabeth, husband Tyson, grandkids Oola and Harris, plus Annie - for a Christmas treat. It was great to spend time with them for a few days. Annie snowboarded, Tyson skied, Lis and the kids tubed down a slope called the Polar Coaster, the kids skied for the first time, and loved it. We ate and drank too much (Lis is a great baker and cook), and enjoyed the dramatic scenery of the Cascade Mountains, a winter wonderland, like a scene inside a glass paperweight, until the second afternoon when a Pineapple Express gusted onto the Coast and sent warm air over the entire province. Freezing rain that night. Hazardous walking. We stayed indoors the next morning until check-out time.
What a great building you live in. Yes, we have gone in different directions since Sonoma, and while you feel you're the same person, you are a person living in New York City, while my environment is closer to what we shared in northern California. Even then I wanted to live some place where the big trees came down to the sea. Mendocino County awed me, but it's as good if not better here. From my old (for this area) cottage-style house I look through the gap between Keats Island and the mainland to Georgia Strait. My back "yard" rises to a forest that soon becomes Soames Regional Park. From the top of Soames Hill, which Annie likes to climb, you can see Howe Sound, the Coast Range Mountains, Keats, Gambier and Bowen Islands nearby, and across Georgia Strait, Vancouver Island.
Howe Sound
I wonder how living in New York has affected your art making. A distraction? Too much stimulation? Are you not happy with what you're producing?
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