As You Like It

In 2007, I started toying with the idea of doing a production of As You Like It with the annual Burning Man festival standing in for the forest of Arden. The deliberately anarchic nature of the blow out at Black Rock seemed to me to be as close to a parallel to Elizabethan forest law as could be found in modern America.

Moreover, it would give me an opportunity to bring the gender confusion comedy central to the text out in a way that would be more relatable to a modern audience. There's an element of gay panic in As You Like It that i've never seen fully realized in any production. For Orlando to be sufficiently confused by Rosalind as Ganymede, he needs to be sensing her as a threat to his own masculinity. I decided to take this to its logical conclusion, and dress Ganymede as a stereotypical leather daddy. If Orlando's going to be confused, let's give him something to be confused about.

The rest of the character concepts flowed easily from there. Celia, as Aliena, could be dressed as an actual Alien. Sir Oliver Martext became a two-bit Vishnu. And just to throw a little more gender confusion into the works, I decided on a female Touchstone, who would be making advances at a drug-addled Audrey.

The production remains purely hypothetical, but maybe one day when time and funding return to my life I'll get the chance to stage it.

Oresteia

In 2006, Ape and Astronaut began work on staging a new translation of Aeschylus' Oresteia, the oldest surviving trilogy from Greek theater. Our intention was to condense all three works into a single, tour de force evening of performance.

I began work on the translation that summer, at the same time doing preliminary sketches for the production design. I knew that I wanted a look which was composed of natural materials - my concept was a multi-level stage made of weathered wood and sand, with the bath where the murder of Agamemnon taking a place of prominence center stage. This tub, to be filled with real water, would become prominent again at the end of the night as Orestes is being tortured (essentially waterboarded) by the furies. Costumes would also be composed of natural materials with significant amounts of leather and fur on display.

As we progressed, it became obvious that while interest was still high, other commitments were putting too much pressure on the group for the production to come to pass. I kept the initial designs and the nearly complete translation on hand in the hopes of some day reviving the project.

One Corner of Paraside

One Corner of Paradise was an original radio play staged in October 2006 by Ape and Astronaut. An old-fashioned, hard-boiled noir detective story, One Corner of Paradise takes place in Las Vegas in 1950, where shamus Jack Quinn gets in over his head with some gangsters, the FBI, and a tiki bar

Set design was minimal. I pulled some costumes from stock and cobbled together two objects which could pass as old-fashioned microphones from some dowels, a christmas wreath holder and - so help me- two spray-painted electric whoopee cushions.

I also directed this production, and in order to overcome the usual awkwardness that comes with having voice-only action on the stage, I instructed the actors to ignore each other and speak directly to the audience. The effect was similar to the intimacy that comes with listening on the radio - with no extraneous action on stage, the audience was free to let their minds' eyes take over. Audience reaction and reviews were overwhelmingly positive.