ouch

august sucks.  trouble and stress have been stacking overlapping like roof shingles keeping out the light of ease and happiness.  a few sky lights have helped; but as I move up towards the end of the month I don't really see an end to it.  I am ee-or (sic), the donkey from winnie the pooh; a big smile brings a bigger frown, fuck.  this sucks.   so many cool things, so many shitty things to bring them down.

at least I made peace with some important people.

a good line

"we have such great sex, it would be a waste not to do it"

one more good review of the play I did the lighting/set design for

'Pugilist' a powerful indictment

Blunt and experimental theater piece moves around in old building as it stresses hardships facing new immigrants.

By JOHN TOWNSEND, Special to the Star Tribune

Last update: August 24, 2010 - 4:44 PM

You actually have to sign a waiver to see "The Polish Pugilist," 
because it's being played on three floors of a tatty building that 
looks as if it might have existed at the time the show is set in.

In the show, writer/director Jeremey Catterton exposes the disconnect between the American Dream and blunt realities faced by new immigrants, such as unpaid wages, filthy housing and treacherous working conditions. Drawing from novelist Upton Sinclair's raging 1906 indictment of the meatpacking industry, "The Jungle," and loosely blending the persona of Rocky Balboa, popularized by Sylvester Stallone, in the Rocky films, Catterton shapes a spare and stunning commentary on the exploitation of immigrants and athletes.

By changing Sinclair's Lithuanians to Poles, Catterton sets up a conceit in which bigoted jokes against that group comment cruelly on the narrative of protagonist Jurgis/Rocky, powerfully played by Catterton himself. Delivered in harshly vaudevillian style, Michael Rylander and Jacob Grun diabolically punctuate Catterton's tribulations with sarcastic quips.

Those tribulations are portrayed as the audience is escorted to the building's three floors for this one-hour show's three acts. Extraordinary but simple imagery abounds. Fabric represents a corpse. Dirt symbolizes scatological degradation. 'Red, white, and blue' ironically equals economic royalism.

As abject poverty compels the protagonist to box, a beguiling ensemble of five performs choreographed punching that is almost too close to the audience. Rylander, reminiscent of Apollo Creed, and Catterton, play out a hypnotically stylized boxing match. The 1419 building evokes a haunting ambience of fabled tenements.

John Townsend writes regularly about theater.

over

over isn't the right word, but get over it is right the right thing to say.   I have a better understanding of things and I am less bothered by the events of a week and a half ago.   I'm done being down about it, I'm done being angry about it and I'm done holding a grudge.   Good friends are more important.  I'm finally (more or less) past my interpretation of the situation and into accepting the explanation of the others; they were the ones present for the whole event.   I'm excited to step forward with a new sense of openness and understanding.  stepping forward is a way better feeling that holding onto the past.   it's also hard to hold a grudge over something I have been more than guilty of (I've often said that a specific girl's boyfriend should have kicked my ass multiple times for doing the same thing that I was so bothered about); this was a much bigger and more intense concentrated version of something in the same vein as something I took part in; except instead of me being a relative stranger to this dude, in my case it was a close friend.  Another difference is that he is a fucking retard and I'm just kind of retarded.

and last night was awesome.  got to meet a junkie (on something hard while I was around the dude) who is obsessed with the girl who played a role in the instance.  he plays his guitar and sings really well; but he has a strange obsession with heroin musicians and "the lifestyle" they engaged in.  pretty fucked up.

then I got to kick it with the lady and to finish it off I found that with some excellent help a bank can be filled and emptied by way of multi-tasking.  

another thing

poop was here, now the shit has been wiped away

ick

dammit.  nothing going my way. ups and downs and downs and shits.   I've never meant "alright" as an answer to "how you are doing?" or "how are things?" more than I have in the last week.

cool review of what has caused me so much stress in the last few weeks

the polish pugilist, presented through august 28 at 1419 washington avenue south, minneapolis. for information and tickets ($15-$25), seejeremeycatterton.com

Catterton himself contributes a committed performance in the eponymous role—though one of the many interesting things about The Polish Pugilist is that it doesn't have characters in the conventional sense. The actors play people with names, but they seem to represent archetypes, and their actions are narrated in third person, as though their lives are out of their own control. Developments are declared, then enacted. The characters are suffering the travails faced by millions of immigrants to this country, and the suggestion that they are without agency might seem insulting if it weren't so clearly portrayed as a collective experience. It's not a story about this man and this woman, it's a story about these people, in this place, at this time.

Working with Catterton are four onstage collaborators—plus an ASL interpreter (Paula MacDonald) who joins the action rather than standing in an offstage spotlight. (It's not clear where "offstage" would be, anyway.) As the story of Catterton's beleagured character unfolds, Jacob Grun, Clare Monesterio, Michael Rylander, and Abbie Williams circle around him like lions in a cage, alternately taking characters and narrating the action. They often—Rylander especially, clad in smoking jacket—pause to tell jokes in the hoary dumb-Polack tradition, and at each punchline the actors moan and grimace as if they'd been physically struck. Again, this could feel insulting or didactic, but it's handled deftly and swiftly: there are no pauses meant to make us think about what we've learned before the action cascades onward.

The play begins on the third floor of the dilapidated interior space at 1419 Washington Avenue, a setting that effectively stands in for the dangerously crowded tenements and run-down houses occupied by the characters. As the first act becomes the second and the second becomes the third, the show practically falls down two flights of steps, with Catterton's character defending himself from a series of brutal physical and emotional blows that are enacted with an almost literally in-your-face physicality (get ready to duck). Then, at the play's climax, Catterton faces off against Rylander—especially for those who have seen the charming Rylander in more conventional fare like Bye Bye Liver and The Saved By the Bell Show, it's worth the price of admission just to see him come bouncing out in an Apollo-Creed-style American flag cape—on a boxing ring of holograms. (I won't even try to explain how that works.) The lighting by Bryant Locher and the costumes by Hilary Falk are all the more effective for their relative minimalism.

In Lamb Lays With Lion vs. Katie Mitchell's The Seagull, Catterton separated the narrative and the emotion of Chekhov's play like oil and water, enacting them side-by-side on the same stage. The concluding act of The Polish Pugilist plays like Jeremey Catterton vs. Sylvester Stallone's Rocky, but with the two interpretations wrapped around one another. Catterton and Rylander go at each other with sweat, blood, and bile—in a clever and well-executed maneuver, the blood is applied by their trainers when the combatants take their respective corners—but they fight at odd angles, under swinging lamps, and to the soundtrack of crashing dance rock accompanied by Grun's live guitar. It's a dazzling spectacle, one of the most powerful things I've seen on stage (er, "on stage") all year—and it's a perfectly-judged conclusion to what's come before. It goes on for a long time, which underlines the point: when you're in the circumstances in which Catterton's character finds himself, there's nothing to do but fight, and fight. And fight. And fight.

If, like me, you're a fan of Catterton and the experimental methods he employs, you don't need to be convinced to see The Polish Pugilist. For the rest of you, this show answers the question, "What can avant-garde postdramatic theater do for me?" It can do this, and you should see it while you have the chance.