soup & widows

I'm directing two ten-minute plays for a local community theatre. It's a ten-minute play fest consisting of seven plays by seven different local authors. I was assigned two plays. One of them is about four friends meeting for soup in order to combat hangovers and fulfill destinical omens. Yes, I made that word up. The other play is about three generations of African-American women who have all lost their husbands to various military action.

The playwright of this latter play came to our rehearsal tonight, which was lovely. She hasn't been involved in the process at all, which has been fine-- she wrote a very good play and we have been content to work on it... but to have her there tonight added an element that was very important. And dear Lord, she is a gorgeous person.

The playwright of the soup play hasn't come to rehearsal yet. I think she's planning to come on Monday evening. I have been having problems with it because the four main characters are sitting at a table at a restaurant and some kind of theatrical convention needs to be employed in order for the audience to be able to see the people sitting around the table. If they all face the center of the table the energy just gets lost. It is a problem I'm currently wrestling with.

Movies

Yesterday, a quadruple-feature.

David and I saw Cedar Rapids. It was funny and silly. John C. Reilly continues to delight me.

Later in the afternoon, I was reading my Woody Allen interview book and decided to watch Another Woman (stellar cameo by Sandy Dennis), then Interiors. Spurred on by a desire to watch Geraldine Page act again, I watched Summer and Smoke. Page does an admirable job of making that prototypical Tennessee Williams southern belle almost nearly believable.

Speaking of movies, I acted in one this past weekend. The working title of the movie is something like The Paranormal Exorcism Project. It is a spoof of Paranormal Activity, Exorcism of Emily Rose, Blair Witch Project, and others. I played Professor Ward, a pretentious academic who reads psycho-sexual undertones into everything. I had a blast doing it, and got a hundred bucks.

But mostly, Let My Movie Career Begin!

Bounty

Peter Masterson's The Trip to Bountiful, starring Geraldine Page, has been one of my favorite films since it came out in 1985. Page's minutely detailed performance, complete with childish tantrums, coquettish flirting, sinking spells, and quiet triumph, is a lesson to me each time I watch it. As one of my acting teachers used to say, "It's all about specificity." And Page is the epitome of specific. For example, in one scene toward the beginning of the film, Page's Carrie Watts has decided to flee her oppressive Houston apartment and nagging daughter-in-law and to revisit her childhood home in Bountiful. She must keep this decision a secret from her cohabitants, who have caught her trying to escape to Bountiful before. In the moment when her son says goodbye to her, as sons say goodbye to their mothers when they go to work, we see Page in a tiny moment of ambivalence as she answers, "Goodbye, Son," knowing that if she carries out her plan successfully, it may be a while before she sees her son again. What Page so masterfully does is, halfway through her "Goodbye, Son," she allows her voice to catch ever so slightly on the "Son," as if she had an impulse to say goodbye to him more completely, but knowing that she musn't give away her plan for escape, she lets the moment go, and the film rolls on.

And then, as a film, it's just so good. It has its weak moments here and there; it isn't perfect. But the final image of Carrie Watts sitting in the back of the car headed back to Houston, her dejection, contentment, sadness and triumph all somehow mixed together on her weary face, never fails to move me.

When I saw the movie for the first time, alone, it had been just a few months since my beloved grandmother had died. Somehow in that final moment of the movie I was blessed with an epiphany having to do with the unconditional nature of my grandmother's love. Maybe it was something in Page's expression in that final shot. Or it could have simply been my projection onto the film because I was still grieving. In any case, I hold the film dear not only because of its excellence but also for the way it resonated for me personally.

This semester at one of my teaching jobs, I have a class of five 7th graders. In December I found a copy of Horton Foote's The Trip to Bountiful (the play) at Barnes & Noble. We read the play in class. I was happy to note that the screenplay barely varies from the original.

I'm going to make a cutting of the play (30-35 minutes) and we're going to perform this play.