Journal | Christian Durso

Posts for Tag: theatre

A Midsummer on Thonglor



I think of Spalding Gray in Swimming To Cambodia, unable to leave Thailand after shooting a film until he had a perfect moment.  I had many of them working on my own film set, collected them like stones in a plate on my desk.   But they don’t often come at the end, as if it were truly a movie.

But I found it anyway in a local production of a Midsummer Night’s Dream at Garden Café along Soi 55. Two nights before I passed the  production and noticed the rehearsal, but they were set to open after I my flight.  The next night I lingered outside the gate, peering in, shifting from one foot to the other.  Eventually the producer came out and I explained how I wanted to see the show and if they needed audience members for their final dress rehearsal.  She told me that they could use the audience for their final dress.  Tomorrow at 7pm.  “It is in Thai, is this okay?”

Absolutely.

So I waved goodbye to my final Thai sunset through the window of the BTS Skytrain and returned to the theatre at the appointed time.   

They put up two large sheets to separate the traffic on Soi 55 from the traffic of the stage. The play began with song as the actors led us into the Garden Space, greeted by puppets twice the size of humans. I was enchanted. The play was translated, and not Word for Word, and they took generous license with the structure but I understood everything— the poor fate of Hermia and Lysander eloping, Helena’s desperate love, and of course Puck’s playful mischief. For the play within the play they picked audience members to play Pyramus and Thisbee and the Lion.  I got to play the Lion for the first time ever.  I’ve played both lovers in the past, but it was Bottom’s Dream I most identified with this  time. I thought of myself waking from a dream, as I would in 24 hours, on the other side of the world.   “Methought I was… methought I had…” and it is a precious vision of being loved by a fairy queen, fed and rubbed and doted on, and for Bottom, it actually happened though he doesn’t know it. He wakes in the woods, unsure, alone. Bottom’s solution, of course, is that he will make a ballad of it, as Spalding Grey once did too.

SHINER opens at Columbia College Chicago

Give it up for this Chicago college production of SHINER as they swing the doors open tonight! This is the FIRST production of this play that has bucked the gender roles, and cast non-binary talent, something I wanted to see since I wrote it.  Leave it to our youth!  The future of theatre is bright. Wish I could be there! From the bottom of my mosh pit ❤️ to yours. 

(Directed by Peter Murphy. Starring Emma Young & Snag Flynn)


A Reply To A Former Student Concerning Advice On Starting A Theatre Company

The following is an email I sent to a former acting student of mine who asked about forming a theatre company in Los Angeles. The show she mentioned was eventually mounted in Hollywood and she told me that my email had an impact in how they went forward. I reread the email and decided the advice was worth sharing.

______!

It's so great to hear from you.  I love that you've started a theatre company!!  Yes yes yes, this is a great thing to do.  ____________ sounds like a wonderful idea and that fact that you're focusing on a female driven story is just the best.

Your question about obtaining financing is the million dollar question.  As long as [your] Theatre is in operation you'll be addressing and struggling with this question, so my advice is to cozy up to it and get used to asking, looking, searching.  

It sounds like ___________ is helping foot some of the bills, which is a great start (a better start than we had at IAMA).  And I think that your goals for wanting to pay everyone involved are really great to have though they do come at a high cost.  I do have some experience with Grants though I have to say that they are time consuming and it's probably best to think about Grants for the long term existence of [your] Theatre rather than to fund a single play, especially the first play.  A grant can often take months to apply for and even more months to hear back about.  And also, once you've had some work and some successes it will probably be easier to obtain some of those grants.  

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Cinephilia, Revisited


Fifteen years ago Lesyle Headland called me and said, “I’m writing a play and there’s this weird roommate character who just showed up, and I kinda hear your voice as I write him. We’re putting together a reading in Bushwick in a few weeks, you want in?” Since at the time I was pretty much just waiting tables and listening to Bjork all day in my South Williamsburg apartment and because Lesyle put together the team dreams are made of— Frank Boyd, Carmen Herlihy, and Lauren Marks as director— it was a no brainer. “Great,” she said, “we’ll rehearse at my place.”

Her place was just up Bedford Avenue, which was perfect, because that meant I could walk to rehearsal. We’d all moved to Williamsburg after graduation because it was affordable, if one can imagine such a thing. We sat around her kitchen table (in my memory Leslye was chain smoking, but perhaps she wasn’t) and we read. Thus began my first “gig” after college. It would also turn into a play that would change my life and forever affect the way I would watch a movie— or a film, I should say— the distinction was made clear, and with expletives, by page five. Cinephilia felt lifted directly from the torn bedsheets of our own idle apartments, and it spoke straight about the mess that gets left in the heart when someone you love isn’t able to love you back— it did all this in movie-language, as if she’d somehow weaponized Easy Riders, Raging Bull but in an empty Brooklyn room save for a broken bed, a DVD player, a neurotic roommate, and the ever-present threat of California. It was brilliant. 

In those precious weeks we talked about heartache, obsession, drugs, Soderberg, 

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