August 11, 2017

The birthday of Johnny Secaur, the kid who lived across the street from me for a while on Goodview. I remember his birthday. I remember he tried to grow radishes in a box. It worked.  He made sculptures out of soap and glued them to rocks. He moved to 1117 Lower Drive in Kent. I thought we’d be friends forever.

Napped on the couch. Dreamed that I had driven a copy of Nimmo’s Quay to the Druid in Galway. I was the very first to arrive in an immense parking lot, that was sort of under water and sort of wasn’t. I delivered the script, but when I tried to find the truck I had driven, I couldn’t find it. Daunting, because I thought I’d parked it precisely where it could be found easily again. Plus, I had to find it before the sea rose and washed it away.

After Washington Place in Omaha, three directors asked to see it. Not one of them read it after it was sent. Some theater guy in Illinois begged to read the Lincoln trilogy, underlining I Promise to Read it.  He never did. JB in New York agreed– or asked, I forget which-- to read new plays, which I sent, and he has not read one of them. I do know this is the proximate cause of the Great and Everlasting Stall, but short of assassination or arson, I do not know how to hammer past it. Send periodic notes, “You promised to read. You will never regret reading”? Hold loved ones for ransom? Ignited by receiving today a rejection from a small press that took 13 months to respond to NSDL, and clearly had, in all that time, not opened the file.

Some time at the studio, mostly wasted. Flocks of people fleeing from the heat in Florida. Lost important keys.

Binchois on the CD

Half thought to audition for Montford’s Othello, till discovering it was a vanity project to show that a woman can play Othello. A woman can say the lines, of course, but beyond that, no. All the work that goes into an honest production pretty much wasted on a stunt. Do I think all gender-blind casting is a stunt? I pretty much do, but it’s because I tend to be evidence based in my thought, and I never saw such an experiment that came near working. I never saw such an experiment except that the ONLY thing you thought about was how well or ill the person was filling the part designed for someone else. Saw V Redgrave in The Tempest at the Globe, and she was a great actor but a mediocre Prospero– even ignoring the fact that she had to go to the back every now and then to have her lines whispered to her. OK, men can be a scream as Lady Bracknell, and I can imagine a killer Julia Caesar. But otherwise– Why don’t they let me play in the NBA? I can dribble; I can shoot a basket.

AG is to direct Uranium 235. Allowed to think of it as a choice, but the choice was actually that or cancel. It will be fine. I always liked AG and miss working with him.

A series of face-slaps recently. I should be used to it- and I AM, actually, but amazed, like Guildenstern at the opening of R&G Are Dead that the same damn thing can keep happening, the same wry tone be struck, with such unnatural and deadening consistency.

I look up, and it’s evening—

Binchois, like the calling of a seabird. . . .