An Actor's Journal- Part 6

Last Friday night, the show finally settled into a place where the bones were there. I don’t know when we started using the word bones to mean "a good structure." It’s not a good metaphor for my structure as these old bones are starting to wear. But, even with my left knee (which apparently is all bone, no cartilage), we finally found a rhythm to a good deal of the show. Friday night was a bit of elation after some sluggish runs.

Then, the all-too short weekend came, a weekend I was completely robbed of as a corporate event with my company ate up most of my Saturday and another impromptu line rehearsal at the theater ate up a lot of my Sunday, including the travel time. But when Cliff, Ray, and I entered the theater, the stage floor had been painted to reveal the gray landscape along with the rough road that Pozzo and Lucky travel on. The elements of the technical aspects of the show were slowly appearing.

When we reconvened Monday night, those bones we had started to splinter and crack. Maybe this is what happens when you have two days without the movement and maybe it was the impending opening date. Whatever the reason, Monday was...for a lack of a better term...a Monday all over.

The Misunderstanding

Tuesday night brought with it many distractions. As tech rehearsal will be this upcoming Sunday, the costume designer, the set designer, and the sound/light operator added to the numbers in the small theater. Then, a terrible moment of tension came. Three quarters of the way through the first act we were asked to “pause,” Keke’s standard work for a break. This break was longer than most of them and we cast members began trying to nail lines and cues for the next scenes. Instead, we were asked to try on costumes, interrupting the flow we needed at that precise moment.

Then, Godot spoke—I mean, God. Every theater has a "God mic"—perhaps it’s used as the instrument that reminds the patrons to silence their phones—it has various uses, especially with tech rehearsals. But the voice was not Keke’s. The Artistic Director, who will also double as a kind of Stage Manager, asked us all a question. “So, what do you think is your main problem right now?” As the rehearsal still had a lot of “Line!” calling, I offered helpfully (for once), “Well, the lines, obviously.”

She countered, “The problem is you can’t get the lines because you’re all in your heads.”

There are certainly moments where such a thing occurs. One may be in brain overload and that gets in the way of the physical process. But, at that moment, at that time in the rehearsal process, it felt like a misreading of what was going on in the room. We were in our heads because we were dealing with a new dynamic having a new Pozzo, we were in our heads because we were searching for cues we still did not know, we were in our heads because we remembered where lines had been flubbed and we were angry wirth ourselves. This rehearsal period has been such a short one for such a complex play. Yes, we were in our heads, but without our heads, we would be lost.

Now there are actors who work primarily through movement and those who are more cerebral. Cliff and I fall into the latter category—we are looking for through-lines, moments of logic (and Godot does have logic, it’s just fuzzy). The other cast members do seem to work more from physical places. But, again, that ain’t the leads in this case.

Keke, through the Stage Manager, asked us to let all our frustration out through dancing to a track from one of the Guardians of the Galaxy soundtracks. Pozzo, Lucky, and the Boy began the exercise. I began wringing my hands (an involuntary sign that a panic attack was on the way). Cliff was still, leaning against one of the audience chairs and we were muttering to each other “This is now what we need right now. This is not what will help us. This is not what we need right now.” I became more nervous with the loud music, Cliff became more pensive. The music finally stopped and Keke asked, appropriately, why Cliff and I didn’t participate. After all, we’ve never done many exercises outsides of blocking and rehearsing the scenes and this was one of the one few extra things she was asking us to do.

But Cliff and I were stymied. I was heading into hyperventilation as an argument arose between Cliff and Keke. I couldn’t express my emotions or back him up. The thing about theatre is you form a family and families often fight. This was a fight, one for which I was unprepared.

At that time, we felt we were robbed of more than half an hour of precious rehearsal time with this exercise and the aftermath. Was it just the tension of an impending opening night? Was she right and we were wrong? Regardless of all these things, I wracked my brain all morning Wednesday. The fact that I had not played ball could spread word that I was a difficult actor and would ruin any chances of being in other shows. But slowly, I’ve realized this will most likely be the last time I act onstage. When prepping my bio for the program, I ended it with, “This one’s for Dad.” While other family members always encouraged my youthful acting path (rare for where I grew up), my father was the one who was my biggest champion. Though he’s not here to see it, this one has turned out to be for him, not for me. It was a slow realization.

So, with the idea of acting finally ending in my life, I was technically free to voice my opinion and my resulting text message to Keke took hours to formulate. While productions of Godot are rare, even most theatre people would likely not put themselves through it. For all its hope, the play has a brutality and a sense of that little-known belief that if we all saw the world in 20/20 vision, we would go around with nooses round our necks. The vast majority of the tickets sold so far are people I know—friends, family, work colleagues. So, I set about for that all impersonal, but to-the-point form of communication known as the text message.

I gave Keke, from my perspective, a run-down of all that had occurred the night before. Earlier in the day, cast members had reached out to check on me, but I thought Keke was scared to (in the end, she left her phone at the theater and did not even read my text until Thursday). In the message, I felt, stupidly, all I could do was offer an ultimatum: that I would walk if such an event occurred again.

When my text message was read, and replied to, Keke and I worked out our differences. I had lost my head and the depressing nature of some aspects of the play had seeped into my behavior. It is hard to admit when you’re wrong, but I did. Thursday night brought with it the best run we’ve had so far.

Sometimes, a little letting out of the tension in the air is a good thing, if painful when it occurs.

Members of the cast will appear on Talk of Alabama on Wednesday morning on ABC 33/40 and hopefully more than just my family will show up during the run.

I suppose this is the time to say what a great, dedicated cast we have, what a cool director we have, what a great opportunity this is.

Will this be my last role? Probably, but it will have been a pleasure to do it.

Buy your tickets now: https://www.onthestage.tickets/show/birmingham-festival-theatre/62ca0102b075e10e2442f2b9/tickets

An Actor's Journal- Part 5

Week 5

As mentioned last week, Virginia Samford Theatre, near Linn Park in Birmingham holds a lot of special memories for me. Between 1993 and 1995, I attended their summer musical theatre workshop for children and adolescents. Back then, it was called the Town & Gown Theatre and, before that, it was the Clark Theater. We would take speech, dance, and singing lessons and perform a show towards the end of the summer. My first year, I met the speech teacher, a foreboding figure who clearly didn’t like me. This was Elizabeth Adkisson Tull. She was also the acting teacher at the Alabama School of Fine Arts (ASFA), where she would accept me for the fall 1995 Theatre Arts department.

She loved education, but in my early years of knowing her, I always thought of her as severe and I hated she didn’t like my jokes. But she clearly saw my potential and I received a few humorous parts. The first year, I didn’t perform in the end-of-camp show. But, in 1994, I had a few memorable comedy parts in T. H. E. Club: Try Helping the Environment. I didn’t know this, but Elizabeth had begun a life in the theatre as a way of doing social work. She fostered many of us and her severity was cut down quite a lot when she divorced her husband. So, I think I know why she always seemed crabby in those early years.

She was not able to teach the final year of the camp. We did a hodgepodge musical revue featuring songs from children’s musicals like How to Eat Like a Child. I missed her that season, but those summer camps were my first introduction to real theaters, the idea of “summer stock,” the process of collaboration, stage moms, divas, the whole sha-bang.

But the Martha Moore Sykes Studio, which is housed in the new part of the building that is VST holds much darker memories. In late 2006, I persuaded a director who was trying to form a new theatre company in Birmingham to produce my latest play. An attempt at a contemporary tragedy, And They Heard the Thunder of Angels, was written right out of my tumultuous final days of college where certain events led to a period of depression that lasted several years. The play, therefore, was appropriately moody and edgy—at least for me, at that time.

We hired the Sykes Studio for the performances, which were in March of 2007. The production was riddled with problems. The director backed out because he was in love and on the verge of marriage and felt my play was saying something that didn’t gel with his head space at the time as it was about the failure of relationships, infidelity, and a young man on the verge of adulthood destroying his life before it had even truly begun. Rough territory—and, although he admired the script—not the right timing for him. He agreed to stay on and produce it and the show effectively ended his desire to continue with his theatre company, which he called The Next Stage.

Angels ran for a few weekends. Although we had posters outside VST, it was shoved into the place mid-season and ticketholders had no advance notice except for articles in the Hoover Gazette and Birmingham Weekly. While Weekly gave a nice write-up based on the script, our seats were mostly empty. Not finding a director, I took on the job myself, which I had never done except for readings of my own plays.

I am a terrible director. If you were to watch videotapes of my productions, they are simply patterns of people standing in triangles and then moving left and right. I never studied directing—I managed to avoid it at both ASFA and Bennington College. I never wanted the job. I don’t have the talent to deal with the varying egoisms, eccentricities, and needs of actors—which can be overwhelming for someone who just wants everybody to show up, learn their lines, speak loudly, and tell the story. Nevertheless, there are always wild ones you can’t rein in, divas who demand prominent staging, and, worst of all, people who you thought could act and you discover in rehearsal, cannot.

I eventually rewrote Angels back into the play I wanted it to be, as I had made huge cuts to account for deficiencies in my casting, and it lives today as The Summer Bobby(ie) Lee Turner Loved Me. I’m still proud of it, but watching people leave the theater depressed as all get-out is not exactly something you yearn for as a writer. It was too much—people today want to be entertained, let out of the real world for a couple of hours. A tragedy ain’t that and we’ve lost touch with the catharsis the Greeks experienced in the Dionysian festivals.

Monday night, I walked into the Sykes Studio, and it exists as much as it did then—a cabaret space with a small stage. While nice, its inclusion has made what used to be a beautiful courtyard (where us kids would play in between Town & Gown classes) a small patch of grass. Looking around the room, I remembered the fits, the starts, the follies of Angels. But I had to get in the right head space for Godot. We began the week by working on the scenes with the Boy and Tank came in, off book, and delivering a stage-worthy performance. I love to watch him work. He’s bringing an energy to Beckett you don’t often get to see, and I think it works really well for the show we’re mounting.

We also attempted to stumble through the first scene off-book (this was supposed to be the day we were to be officially off-book, but the date kept getting pushed back). There was a lot of “Line!” calling and frustration, but it was nice to have the text out of our hands so we could begin to work on the physicality of the characters. Gogo, my part, is constantly hounded by the pain in his feet and I was able to fully embody such a man—stoop-shouldered, funny walks, etc.

The next night was to be our first official run-through and, as the text is difficult, Keke allowed us to have scripts in hand. All first run-throughs are slogs, like a lawnmower running over too high grass and getting bogged up in the deck. Tuesday night was no different. When Act I was over, I offered, unhelpfully, “That was longer than Wagner’s Ring Cycle.” In another space with little air conditioning, it certainly felt like it. Tightening up “Pozzo and Lucky Land” is the next step in finding the show and right now it feels more like a distraction than an integral part of the piece.

Exasperated and frustrated, we began Act II oddly, but found a rhythm as it went along. It was clear how little off book we are for Act II because our eyes never left the pages. I’ve already opined how little time I have in life right now to learn the lines and I get more nervous every day. The number of times my character says, “And what of it?” in the first act and “True” in the second act leads me to believe I might just throw those out there in case one sticks, which would be bad for a play of this magnitude.

Drained of all energy, we left the Studio much later than our normal end time. The other actors were thrilled to see the work Cliff and I have done in our duo scenes and, for that, I was much edified, but I couldn’t show it. The knee that was operated on last year is aching profusely with all the movement and my face at the end of rehearsal exuded, “I remember why I stopped this.” Alas, it creeps toward us. By the time you read this, we will be fourteen days until Opening Night. I write none of this to dissuade you from seeing it. We’ll bring it together. We’re just in that tender stage of the process where hopelessness and excitement meet and cancel each other out.

Wednesday night, we ran through Act I again. Stumbled-through is the better word. The lines were still giving us pause. We made plans to meet on the weekend to run them because, without them, there’s little work that can be done. Around the time we were about to begin Act II, Paul, the man who arranged for us to work in the Studio, came in and told us a bad storm was coming. We were free to stay and rehearse, but there was a chance of hail, and the lights began to flicker in the Studio, so we were dismissed under the proviso that we go home and work on our lines.

I drove through a torrential downpour with a sky that might as well have been bright yellow from all the lightning. There were brief moments of hydroplaning and never a speed of more than 56 as I couldn’t see with the speed of my wiper blades, but I finally made it home. After that, I took a suggestion from Keke and made four audio recordings: my lines in Act I, my lines in Act II, and then my cues for both. Unfortunately, as I was getting sleepy, I did not leave enough time in the cue ones to respond, so those will have to be redone. But, otherwise, I am listening to my lines repeatedly when I’m not working. To the degree I can learn them through osmosis, I’m not sure. But time will tell.

We resumed Thursday night with a concentration on line work for the Pozzo and Lucky scenes and refreshed our memory of the blocking during Lucky’s monologue (I have learned since that the brilliant choreography was a collaboration between Keke and Sydney Batten, the actor playing Lucky) as we had only marked it the night before (in other words, went through the motions) as Lucky had a splitting headache and needed no jostling from the props and other actors. I think, when we have it down pat, it will be a highlight of the show.

Cliff’s daughter Velma joined us once again. She has proved an excellent person to run lines with, all of twelve years old—obviously intelligent to read Beckett with, perhaps, more fluency than some of us! Her favorite line in the play is when Didi and I embrace and I recoil, saying, “You stink of garlic.” That’s one of my favorite lines too. Friday night was an actor’s-only rehearsal to get through the lines of Act I. More and more began to be consumed by our brains. Sydney was very gracious with her time in being on book and reading Pozzo’s lines for Cliff and myself. We returned the favor to help her with her massive monologue.

We repeated the process Saturday morning, Cliff having invited us to his lovely home. Act II was the focus that day. Clearly, there was still more work to be done, but we made it through, sometimes with the help of a script. We prepared for the next week and hope to surprise Keke with more memorization, or at least enough to be able to get back to refining the staging.

Every rehearsal has tender, scary moments such as these—it happens with every show. It’s all about being there for each other, working together, and getting the job done. That’s what community theatre is all about and I hope you join us. You don’t have your tickets yet? What are you waiting for, Godot?

Week 6

The next week brought with it a breath of fresh air. It is a delicate matter, but sometimes things just don’t work out. In my brief tenure as a director, I found myself in a few instances where someone I thought would be perfect for a role turned out to be not quite the right fit. Such was the case with our Pozzo. Handling the removal is touchy and requires grace and bravery, but Keke has both. Thus, we began rehearsals this week with a new cast member who has stepped in mightily (and already has a good deal of the text memorized).

I had encouraged my friend Raymond E. Cole III to audition for Godot before we began. I know him to be an exceptional human being and I knew of his talent because he graciously performed roles in a reading of my plays ca. 2012 at Pinson Valley High School, where I was teaching at the time.

Ray, a voice actor by profession, brought in a bright and positive energy from day one. Being back in a theater for him was a joy and you could see it on his face. After our first night of rehearsals, we were sharing our thoughts on the special nature of theatre. Theatre began with shamans performing rites and the Greeks celebrating the god Dionysus. “It began as a spiritual experience and it still is one,” I offered to Ray. And it is. Doing theatre blows the dust of your soul.

But we came back to the problem with the lines. It cannot be overstated how so many of the lines seemingly come out of nowhere. But, after a couple of nights of serious script study, we began to see connections we previously didn’t see. We also discussed why we wanted to do the play in the first place and Keke shared her insights on the script as well. The overriding theme of our discussion was that Godot is about the nobility of carrying on when things seem the darkest in life. Such is the state of Didi and Gogo as they navigate their meager existence. They persevere even when giving up the waiting seems like a viable option.

So, after those nights of introspection and hard work, we found a great deal more of the text under our belts—it’s always about making connections—and next week we can get in the habit of running the show. This time unencumbered by the persistent calling of “Line!”

Well, we’ll see at any rate. Buy your tickets now!

An Actor's Journal- Part 4/New Publication Announcement

This week, I’ll catch us up on two weeks of rehearsal as the opening date of Waiting for Godot at BFT barrels toward us.

Week 3

It is a sad but true fact of theatre life that, when you’re in a play, your haircut is up to the director. While many have recently encouraged me to grow it longer (which I can’t stand as duck tails [woo-hoo] and curly hairs start to emerge), I gingerly asked Keke how she wanted my hair for the show, hoping to keep my hair a bit cropped.

One of the reasons I was concerned about the hair length was because, by day, I live the corporate life and there are certain haircuts that just don’t work well in that setting. Her response was “as messy as possible,” so I figured a haircut was out of the question (and it was already getting too long; when I start parting it, I’m unhappy). But, as soon as she saw how quickly my hair grows, she gave me permission for a haircut prior to this week of rehearsal (phew!) so it would be appropriately “messy” by the time we open.

The hair is shorter, but the lines still loom as we must be off book on Monday, August 7th. You will be reading this and wondering how that process is coming along. My fingers are crossed but time is of an issue. I still work, work out, eat a quick dinner, and head to rehearsal only to be at home by ten depleted enough to crash. The weekend of the 5th and 6th were, as Didi says in the play, “my only hope” to get these lines down as best as I can.

There is a special kind of anxiety when learning lines for a Beckett play. I’m not saying I’ve fiddled with authors’ lines in the past, but often you would say the lines as you memorized them, forgetting commas, dropping/adding words. This is fine if you’re doing a lesser writer, but not Shakespeare and not Beckett nor any other writer from the canon. However, I would argue Shakespeare (at least in verse form) is easier to memorize. Beckett is, quite sincerely, the greatest playwright of the 20th century and I don’t want to do him a disservice. But we are talking about a French play translated into Irish-affected English spoken by American mouths, so the words come out as, as the play has been described, absurd. Or at least affected. It’s hard.

As we could not have the space Monday night, we walked into a theater Tuesday night that had about the same heat and humidity level of Miami, Florida. A special event the prior Friday had accidentally either left the air conditioning running (freezing some filters) or it had something to do with a new unit (don’t worry, it’ll be fixed by the time the show opens). But, that night, we were in a hot space with no fans. My standard rehearsal attire consists of long, light, black sweatpants for easy movement, a light (materially) black tee-shirt, and a short-sleeved button down over it and unbuttoned. Add to that fact that we’re rehearsing in the worst August heat of an Alabama summer plus I have to wear an ill-fitting rehearsal bowler hat, it was a miserable night full of hat-fanning and peeling our shirts from our sweaty bodies in between scenes. But we made it through.

During the rehearsal break, we made our way to the darkened, perfectly cooled lobby with an ice machine and we discussed the play. It’s weird to admit this as I consider myself a fairly intelligent person and I’m in the play, but I have always been confused by what the characters Pozzo and Lucky represent. My go-to assumption is one that comes right out of Beckett’s experience. As a member of the French Resistance, he spent many a night crawling through fields, grey and unfeeling spaces like the ones Didi and Gogo find themselves in. So, my thought has always been that Pozzo represents a kind of fascist dictator (maybe Mussolini because Pozzo sounds Italian?) and Lucky represents one of the many slain during the war as his speech reflects a kind of broken remembrance of academic knowledge and therefore could perceivably be seen as a broken intellectual persecuted during the Holocaust. But, then again, that doesn’t totally hold water ‘cause why Mussolini rather than Hitler? I could be wrong. I know I’m wrong. So, I dared to ask Keke who Pozzo and Lucky were.

Her response was that of a director to an actor. “They’re your friends who you keep forgetting.” Her responses were appropriate and ones I already knew having performed the scenes, but I guess I wanted her interpretation of them. Finally, she said, “That is something I wouldn’t tell you because if I did, then we would go on to paint that picture for the audience and their chance at their interpretation would be robbed from them." A totally accurate and sensible response. But I made her promise me she would tell me after the play closed. It is open to interpretation; I was just curious of hers as she is directing and, therefore, smarter than me as far as the play is concerned. Again, this is part of me having not been an actor for many years. I should only be concerned with my character’s baggage. Hard to remember when you’ve principally worked as the author of a play for so many years.

The next night, we went back to the Pozzo and Lucky scenes—two gargantuan sections in the middle of the acts which require a physicality I’m simply unused to now. I had mostly forgotten the blocking because we had been away from them for a while. We fine-tuned and made some changes, including some brilliant choreography that should soar once we open. The Lucky is a very fine actor and moves like a ballet dancer or at least someone so comfortable in her own body, she makes her walk even like a graceful ballet.

The stage director Robert Wilson once said no matter what body type you are—short, skinny, fat, tall—if you are comfortable in your own skin, you can master stage movement. I have never felt comfortable in this body—as if it were a wonky vessel from the factory given to the wrong soul. So, Gogo is especially hard as he is mostly physical. My recent attempts in life to walk with better posture are all shot to Hades as Gogo is slumped over and dealing with foot problems throughout the course of the play. So, in a way, I can lean into my natural stance. Although my feet are in fine fettle, I do recall recovering from knee surgery last November and the pain that preceded it (it will have to be replaced in 10-15 years alas, but what can you do? Shortly after the play closes, I will be forty and I just have to get used to these sorts of things).

Week 4

The majority of the next week was more of what the director and I call “Pozzo and Lucky Land.” The two characters, who I still haven’t figured out, break the monotony of just Didi and Gogo and trying to entertain ourselves while we wait for Godot, who never comes (spoiler alert).

Keke has devised a hysterical physical comedy gag during Lucky’s infamous speech—a two-and-a-half-page nonsensical diatribe that sounds like AI writing an academic paper on the existence of God. One famous actor who played Lucky played the role (an old man, being played in our cast by a young woman) as if he was suffering from Parkinson’s Disease. When he shared this with Beckett, whose mother died of the same illness, he seemed pleased at the interpretation, but that is not what we will provide. Our Lucky scene is a lot more physical.

The stage directions call for the other characters onstage to get consistently more irritated with the speech leading to a melee in which we wrestle Lucky’s hat away from him (in the play, hats tend to represent the characters’ minds and they often peer into them when trying to recall information). Rather than having us stand around jeering, the rope by which Pozzo controls Lucky becomes one in which all the characters are tangled as Lucky pounces round the stage. It is an ingenious bit of directing which may help audience members enjoy the scene when they would otherwise simply be slack jawed by a delivery of the monologue.

The rehearsals were tedious as the actor playing Pozzo is still trying to pin the character down; the actor playing Lucky seems to have a clear idea of what she’s trying to accomplish, but we all have work to do. The physical movements are still arduous, and I discovered a physical ailment later in the week. The knee that was operated on last November is acting up again and it might have something to do with the fact that I do lots of physical gags in the first act wearing only one shoe. A knee pad may need to be a part of my gym bag as I make my way to rehearsals next week.

The last time I acted was in late 2006. The iPhone had yet to be invented and most of us were still carrying around flip phones with limited texting plans. I had taken for granted how ubiquitous cell phones are now. In this production, we all find ourselves, during breaks, checking text messages, Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), Instagram, etc. Sometimes the phones end up being tossed out of pockets onstage as one forgets they are now part of our regular anatomy, shoved into various pockets, and I daresay “notes” are even being typed into them rather than the old-school way of jotting them down on paper (paper? what’s that?).

I should be relieved at this as the day before I was prepping for our Lucky scene, I realized I couldn’t read a single note I had made in my script. Surrounding Lucky’s block prose, there might as well have been Chinese symbols—my handwriting is that atrocious. But even though some say I might have missed my calling, I can almost guarantee I wouldn’t have made it through medical school.

My day consists of leaving home at 7am, working from 8am to 5pm, working out from 5:00 to 5:30, then rushing to the theater to make sure I get what has become my parking space (just in case you were misled). Rehearsal runs generally from 6:30 to 9:00-9:30pm whether we’re onto something or not. Keke has been very conscious of our time. I probably live the farthest away from anybody—about half an hour north. So, at 10:00pm or so, I pass out and wake up to do it all again the next morning.

Which, as you can imagine, leaves little time to really work on the lines, many of which are repetitive and sometimes come out of unnaturalistic places in unnaturalistic ways. Since we changed the date for being officially off-book to Tuesday rather than Monday, I spent the day with the text the Saturday after this week’s rehearsal and Cliff, my Didi, did me a great kindness on Sunday morning (I played hooky at church) and we ran lines over the phone, assisted at one point by Cliff’s daughter Velma reading the lines of Pozzo.

As mentioned earlier, Cliff has become a valuable collaborator. Once an actor in New York and Los Angeles, he also worked in production and his work ethic and dedication is all an actor ever desires in another. Hope to work with him again in the future—but I’m finding this might be the last acting gig (it’s exhausting!). Of course, as you remember from Journal Entry #1, I’ve said that a few times in my life only to renege.

BFT once again has the space for other events the week you’re reading this, so we’ll be rehearsing at the Martha Moore Sykes Studio at the lovely Virginia Samford Theatre adjacent to Linn Park. VST is one of the oldest theaters in Birmingham that came from the “Little Theater” movement that swept America post-Depression and has, at various times, been named the Clark Theatre and Town & Gown. In its “Town & Gown” days, they held a day camp for budding actors/actresses aged elementary through high school. That is where I acted in my first musicals which were not church plays (my elementary school was run by a church, so the school cantatas were still “church plays”). There, I also met my acting teacher, Elizabeth Adkisson. She taught speech and directed the mainstage show T. H. E. Club: Try Helping the Environment, which was, as you can suspect, an eco-protest play for children in which I got to do a couple funny gags, which got some attention in an article from the much-missed Birmingham Post-Herald.

But the Sykes Studio in particular holds difficult memories for me as that is where my play The Summer Bobby(ie) Lee Turner Loved Me (then called And They Heard the Thunder of Angels) premiered in 2007. It was a financial disaster because it was shoved in mid-season with no advance notice to VST ticketholders. Also, it failed as entertainment, being an attempt at modern tragedy that depressed literally everyone who saw it. I hope I can shake off the haunting and go on with our first full-runs of the show. And hopefully, I’ll be off book. Fingers still crossed.

Do you have your tickets yet? They’re on sale here!

By the way, I did some of this last weekend too.

New Publication Announcement!

Still a writer first and foremost, I'm also excited to announce my poem "Toast to Renée" has been published in the July 2023 issue of Literature Today: An International Literary Journal!

It has been a great year for publications and I am most pleased that my poetry is finally beginning to get some recognition. The journal is available in electronic form, but I encourage you to purchase the print edition which is available at this link. Follow Literature Today on Facebook and support the over one hundred writers who are represented in this volume!

Toasts all around!