Well, 

It's sunday morning.  I've been here at the office for a couple of hours sorting through the past few weeks, and trying to wrap my brain around the next stage of ThomThom's development.

I suppose the first thing that needs to be said is thank you all so much.  We had an amazing turn out.  We nearly sold out every night, which is pretty impressive considering the theoretical 11pm go.  While many folks understandably only had time for handshakes and congratulations before they went off to turn into pumpkins, those folks who stuck around to chime the late night bells and holler at the moon provided some really insightful feedback- which is what we wanted.  It is a work in progress, so that feedback was more than just useful, it was simultaneously affirmative and humbling, a pat on the back and a shove over the ledge, a finger that points to all the work ahead of us. 


Special thanks also go out to all of our Kickstarter donors, without whom this work could not have happened, all of the folks at CAST who somehow found a way to keep me from turning into an absolute loony tune (and also provided the space...) and to anyone who ever gave us an encouraging word.


While I fantasize about waxing witty and poetic here on the blog, I don't have the strength.  I've got some more work to do, and an engagement with some root beer floats I must attend. But before I do, just met me say thanks one more time.


cheers, 
barney

Just before beginning this rehearsal process, I spent a lovely afternoon playing disc golf with a friend of mine at Kilborne Park.  A few days later, I was seeking someone with the courage to rub me down vigorously with a coarse cheese grater, as I had contracted yet another awful case of poison ivy.   Being particularly susceptible to this malady and without any sort of health insurance, I sought to relieve my itchy agony by taking benadryl by the fistful. While this did soothe my fiery skin condition, it also created a genuine concern among the cast and company that their intrepid director had developed a unhealthy dependency on over the counter antihistamines.  Eager to prove them wrong, as soon as my skin condition cleared up I put the benadryl back in my medicine cabinet.  Assuring the cast and company that I was finally "off the bennies" we continued our daily adventures into the merry and gothic world of ThomThom. 

As the process continues, I am regularly stunned by how our chorus- a painted gang of unruly and nomadic criminal sorcerers- are really just grotesque extensions of simple human desires.  Poor heartless Thom seeks authentic intimacy and affection, Savage Red desperately needs a sort of great personal validation, and the melancholy Lizzie just wants to stop turning turning tricks and cutting throats so she can go swimming once in awhile.


Flannery O'Connor said "...Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks... because we are still able to recognize one."  So if this grotesque clan of magical time traveling hooligans are just amped up versions of our own essential needs, what makes them so freakish?  To be honest, I really don't think they are.  They are desperate for sure, and they might be bizarre in the basest physical sense (after all, they're still wizards) and granted- they do hurt people,  I still don't really see them as totally sociopathic monstrosities. Perhaps their voracious appetites for affection, affirmation, and peace of mind have simply marked them.  Maybe they have only been mutated by their own search for meaning. Maybe they just suffer too much from the pursuit of their desires, such pursuits leaving them scarred and ugly.  O'Connor also said: "Most of us have learned to be dispassionate about evil, to look it in the face and find, as often as not, our own grinning reflections with which we do not argue, but good is another matter.  Few have us have stared at that long enough to accept that its face too is grotesque, that in us the good is something under construction..."


So in the midst of all these ruminations, I have developed a terrible sinus infection of some type.  It gives me terrible headaches, dizziness, even nausea, not mention the dreadful feeling that the inner airways of my face have been filled with rubber cement.  So I went to my local pharmacist- a man I've known since my childhood, I should add- to see what he recommended.  So as you may have guessed, I'm back on the pills for the time being- but please let me assure you, I'll be fine-totally fine.  I just take these to make the pain and swelling go away.  It's fine, I promise.


cheers, 
barney

clockwise from top left: portrait of Thom by Luke Pizzato, portrait of Jean Louise by Chloe Aktas, portrait of Savage Red by Jeremy Shane, mind map created by ensemble.