War and Heroes and Standing in the Breadline

I went and saw The Heroes of Wicker Park yesterday, which was very fun. Surrounding the show for the early arrivals was a sort of arts festival with characters from the show playing instruments and games with a group of kids who I assume were area children. The show itself was largely spectacle, featuring men in beautiful papier-mache puppet heads wandering the park with a giant wooly mammoth. There was a loose story that centered around the two puppet-headed men being kicked out of the park by an umpire, who claimed the park for the baseball club. From that beginning, the processional of mammoth and puppet heads ambled the park into dances, games of chess, flying goose puppets, beat-poetic monologues about the history of the park, and so on and so forth. In the end, the ruling conflict of the show was solved with tremendous ease and very little effort on the part of the main characters, but that's fine. The point of the show wasn't narrative and conflict resolution. The point of the show was the spectacle and the use of the park to set their scene. This they did marvelously.

More than just the experience of watching the show, which was good in its own right, I got a lot of ideas for the serial show Tantalus is performing next summer (the show was my idea, the purpose being to create a mosaic show, one that an audience could see one performance of and get a complete show, but in seeing more than one performance they would see that each show is a piece in a larger structure of a play), many ideas in terms of aesthetic choices, ways of bringing audience in, etc. I've more or less decided to make it my mission to see as many outdoor theatre pieces as possible this summer for the purposes of gathering ideas.

After the show, my friend Jessica and I walked up to the Breadline Theater for a benefit party being held for "The Gunslinger (and a Baby)", which was written by my friend Kalena (the astonishingly talented playwright who is writing the script for Slide). Tantalus and Breadline have a bit of an off history together. When we performed Dreadful Penny..., we used the Breadine's studio space and had a multitude of problems in dealing with their artistic director, Paul Kampf (who was an old friend of my college's department chair), and we more or less swore vendetta against them for all time. After two years, though, it seems the vendetta has lapsed on both sides, and though I don't think I'll want to work with Paul any time soon, it was still good to see him and a few of his company members again.

Bonnie and I have been engaged in a randomness pissing match on Ogle My Blogspot. I was doing pretty well until I discovered an addictive Star Wars flash game and got distracted from my mission. She has since surpassed me and is taking over the Ogle My universe the way the Borg take over planets. Resistance is futile...