Jeebus Christ!

Been a while, eh? Anyone remember when I pulled the disappearing act last year around this time, too? Yeah, so do I.

Apologies to all, especially to the Escanaba In Love/R.U.R. entry still lingering half-finished on my desktop; and to The Picture Of Dorian Gray, which gave me lots of interesting thoughts on Wilde the playwright vs. Wilde the novelist; and to Dog In A Manger, which is a brilliant fucking adaptation, even if only about half the cast can get close to pulling it off; and to Nicole LeGette, who provided my official formal introduction to Butoh, both in performance and workshop form (I'm still a little sore and I love it); and to The Threepenny Opera, which would have been on my Best of the Best if I had gone before the closing performance; and to the Steppenwolf Garage, to which I had never been and which is the absolutely, god-damned, hands-down, perfect space for my take on SubUrbia, the opening play of The Nine, and which I am now bound and determined to get in there, no matter the amount of wining and dining, proposal writing, and gussying myself up as professional yet edgy (or edgy yet professional) I have to do. So take note, any Steppen-ssociates who may be reading...

So I apologize, but I may continue to be sparse for a while. You see, it's a really exciting time -- I hit what Tony might refer to as my tide. Dracula is closing next weekend (so come see it); DADA is just gearing up and I've been stretching my poor anarchy brain cells, which had begun to atrophy, in order to get some DADA writing done; we'll be starting to have informal get-togethers for the Right Brain Project's production of Fernando Arrabal's ...And They Put Handcuffs On The Flowers this weekend, because even though it goes up in February, we'll need to be that comfortable with each other -- and if you don't know what I'm talking about, please, please hunt down some Arrabal. Hell, please, please do it anyway.; I'm crunching hard on The Nine, especially on Number Five, an original piece by yours truly entitled BlueGrass; I've been doing a lot of completely unstructured, completely unpublic physical movement work that I really have no idea what it is, but I love it and would like to find a way to make it a little less unpublic (butoh only amplified this); and while I'm seeing less shows than I was, the ones I am seeing are tremendously exciting -- it seems to be a watershed time for rock-and-roll, let's fucking do this, kick you in the teeth theatre: Threepenny rocked my beggar's socks off; Red Tape's Dog In A Manger script is a-freaking-mazing, I'm not even kidding; I've already got my tix for Kafka on the Shore and Edward II, which both look from these eyes to be playin' exactly how they wanna play and fuck the rest of y'all; the MCA's got me hooked up with Cie Heddy Maalem and GATZ on the way; and there's all this other stuff that I hope to get to and I hope is half as cool as it looks: Cabaret of Desire, The Further Adventures of Hedda Gabler, The Young Ladies Of..., The Brothers Karamazov, Radio Macbeth; and then there's the long-term exciting stuff: lots more MCA, Jimmy McDermott does The Maids, the sweet-christ-on-a-bike O'Neill Festival line-up; Lieutenant of Inishmore.

Good god damn. It's an exciting time to be a theatre artist in Chicago. So you'll pardon me if I take some to enjoy and add to that myself while stopping in here occasionally. I'll be back. I always am.

And I'll return to link everybody later. I gots Our Town tix that I gotta go enjoy.

P.Rekk
2008