It’s A Suggestion Not A Review: “I fell in love with James Tyrone and was so happy for a time.”

In which the author (Dave Sikula) bids his constant readers farewell.

Let’s cut to the chase. I’m outta here. This is my last blog post around these parts for the foreseeable future. While I’m neither retiring from blogging nor the theatre (nor anything else, really), I am taking a break. Whether it’s a long one or a short one, I have no idea.

First of all, my thanks to the proprietor. Without his encouragement and support – and deadlines – I wouldn’t have resumed my long-form online writing. Everyone here at the Pub is wonderful and offers unique perspectives on what’s happening in the theatre in San Francisco – and beyond – and deserves your continued custom and patronage.

But now, moving on. Even though we’ve passed the traditional navel-gazing that accompanies the end of a year, it’s close enough that I feel like I can indulge myself.

There have been any number of topics I’d have liked to talk about over the past couple of weeks and years, but have restrained myself both for propriety’s sake – and out of common sense. I’ve talked (at length) about how there are certain things I just can’t/am not allowed to say.

It’s like how, on Facebook, there are a number of people I keep in my news feed for the sole purpose of having them annoy me. “This again?” I mutter as I hit the “Hide” button or roll my eyes at their obtuseness or forced witticisms. (And please be sure; I am under no illusions that there aren’t simply legions of my erstwhile friends who have hidden me or have a similar reaction when they see I’ve posted – or blogged – or done anything – yet again.)

(Ironically, I started writing something on this topic and found myself starting to say something I wanted to, but couldn’t, due to the possibility of being misinterpreted, in spite of it ultimately being self-deprecating.)

Regardless, this break couldn’t come at a better time. I suddenly find myself chockablock with theatre projects that will be eating up my life for the next few weeks. I’m about to go into rehearsal for Sam and Dede (or, My Dinner with Andre the Giant) at Custom Made Theatre Company (tickets here). It’s the story of the unlikely (and true!) friendship between Samuel Beckett (whom I play, despite my lack of cheekbones and general lack of grizzled aspect) and Andre the Giant.

Sam …

…and Dede

It’s a great script, but it’s a monster; about 140 pages of (basically) two- or three-word exchanges (which should take only about 90 minutes, but still … ). Because we have a limited rehearsal period, I’ve been working on my lines for a good three months now, and actually know many of them, Fortunately, Robert Shepard, who plays Andre, and I have been meeting to run lines and get a head start. Once we start rehearsing, it’ll be down and dirty and having to get a lot accomplished in a very short period of time. Once the show opens though, I think it’ll be a fun and interesting and entertaining evening.

I find myself of two minds about it, though. Brian Katz, Custom Made’s Artistic Director, was doing radio interviews last week and was plugging Sam and Dede (along with the rest of the season), and as he described the show, I suddenly realized that, other than Robert and I, no one knows what we’re doing with a very good script. While I’m more than anxious to share it with an audience (I think – knock wood – it’s going to go over very well), at the same time I like the idea that it belongs to Robert and me and no one else, though. It’s not dissimilar to the feelings I’ve had at final dresses of shows I’ve directed; that feeling that it no longer belongs to me.

Rehearsals will be so involved, though, that I’ll have to miss a good many (if not all) of the rehearsals for the production of my translation of Uncle Vanya at the Pear Avenue Theatre way down in Mountain View (tickets here). One of my goals with this production is that I want to tailor the language to the cast (which is a very good one), but I’ll be so involved with Sam and Dede that my contributions and consultations will mostly be limited to email.

“Bozhe moi. Sikula’s translating my plays?”

Somewhere in there, as well, I have to cobble together an audition for the TBA Generals.

So, all in all, I have a very jam-packed rest-of-winter, but, after that? Zilch. Nada. Nix. Zero Nothing. Hopefully, that will change, but right now? Nothin’. On the bright side, that means I’ll have plenty of time to work on my latest Chekhov translation (The Cherry Orchard, available – along with my translations of the other major plays – to producers who are interested) and another project (potentially a cash cow) that I’ve had in mind for a while. Not to mention a couple of other projects I’ve been wanting to pursue. (With lots of roles for actresses; be warned.) Unfortunately, that means I’ll have no excuse to not work on any or all of them.

So that’s it. I gotta run lines and tidy the place up for my replacement. I encourage you all to see Sam and Dede (it’s a really good script, even with me in it) and Uncle Vanya. All that’s left is for me to leave you with words to live by, my favorite curtain line; words that I’ve found are suitable to any occasion:

http://s1098.photobucket.com/user/allengu/media/ScreenShot2014-07-29at15615AM.jpg.html

“Son of a bitch stole my watch.”

I’m outta here, ya low-ridin’ punks!

It’s A Suggestion Not A Review: Breaking the Rules About Breaking the Rules

Dave Sikula, rulebreaker.

A month or so ago, the proprietor of this here site gathered all the various and sundry personalities who give these pages their flavor in order to (more or less) create some guidelines and ground rules for the upcoming months.

Being the social butterfly I am, I had previous plans on that very day and was unable to make the gathering. When I received the minutes of the meeting, one of the suggestions for topics was “breaking the rules.”

The Theatre Pub bloggers meeting

“Well,” thought I, “that’s fodder for material.” (Okay, I didn’t think that all, but go with me; it’s part of the convention.)

As I started thinking about it, though, I realized that I don’t have a lot of material in that area. (Even considering my recent series of posts about breaking and entering and attempted arson.) As an actor, I do what my director asks. (Even if I don’t necessarily agree with it.) As a director, I do my darnedest to what I think the writer is asking. As a writer, I’m long-winded, but try to be linear.

My recent rehearsals have kept me from seeing any plays, so I can’t even use that to draw on. (I can’t even remember the last show I saw.) But, even if I had seen something, propriety and common sense (and decency) would keep me from giving all but the most fulsome praise to it. (This applies only to the written word, I might add. There are things I’ll tell you in person that I just won’t commit to the Internet where it could potentially come back to bit me in the ass. I mean, it may still come back to bite me, but at least I won’t be leaving it out where just anyone can stumble across it.)

There have been a few things that have occurred lately and that I’ve read recently that cry for comment and shooting down, but about which I feel like I can’t comment because I’ll hurt feelings or say something even more stupid than usual.

Hence, as much as I want to break those rules – in saying things that I firmly believe about certain people events, or things – I’m going to break the rules about breaking the rules and not talk about them.

It’s especially frustrating because I’ve been reading some jaw-droppingly stupid stuff – not Kim Davis stupid, but it’s close enough that (to misquote another dope) “I can see it from my house”) – that almost cry for being taken down, but I can’t go there. (Suffice it to say that there are people whom I read online – and especially on Facebook – who need to realize that not everything they think, say, or write is either profound, comedy gold, or even vaguely interesting. (On those identities, I will be as silent as the tomb – and suffice it to say, yes, I do include myself in that category.)

As I write this, I’ve been seeing television commercials for both The Lion King and Phantom of the Opera and finding myself appalled that people actually pay good money to see those shows and others like them.

I’m suddenly reminded of Robert Benchley. (I’ll pause when you click on that link.) For those who don’t know him, Benchley was a writer who flourished in the first half of the last century. He started writing short humorous pieces in the late 1910s, became the drama critic for the original Life Magazine (which was a humor publication that bore no relationship to the later photojournalism weekly), eventually moving over to the same slot at The New Yorker, before – through a series of circumstances – becoming a beloved character actor in the 30s and 40s. (He died in 1945 at the age of only 56.) No less an expert on humor than James Thurber said that “one of the greatest fears of the humorous writer is that he has spent three weeks writing something done faster and better by Benchley in 1919.”

Mr. Benchley.

As the critic for Life, one of Mr. Benchley’s duties was to write capsule blurbs for the plays on Broadway, one of which was Anne Nichols’s Abie’s Irish Rose, a stupid comedy about a Jewish boy who falls in love with an Irish Catholic girl. That’s about as complicated and funny as the show got, but it was inexplicably popular, logging 2,327 performances over more than five years (in an era when a run of six months was a smash and that of a year was a blockbuster.) Its run is still the 29th-longest in Broadway history – and #3 for plays.

Critics hated Abie; I mean HATED it. They reacted in ways that make my own dislikes seem mild. Mr. Benchley may have hated it more than anyone, though, so he used those capsules to eviscerate the show, two of which sum up my feelings about Phantom and Lion King (among many, many others): “Where do people come from who keep this going? You don’t see them out in the daytime” and “People laugh at this every night, which explains why democracy can never be a success.”

So, as much as I’d like to emulate Mr. Benchley (or “Sweet Old Bob,” as his friends called him) and speak truth to power (or the powerless, as the case may be … ), there are some particular rules I’m afraid I just don’t have enough gumption to break.

On the Internet, that is. Like I said, ask me in person – or, better yet, buy me a drink – and I’ll spill the beans like Niagara on steroids.