Diary of the Raven: Everything Counts (In Large Amounts)

Polishing a script is like a Big 10 football game. A lot of grinding, and not a whole lot of movement. (Not a perfect analogy, perhaps, but it’s been months since I’ve had college football to be excited about, so I hope you’ll let that one pass.) It is, however, tiny detail after tiny detail, with each one rippling through the piece, necessitating more and more changes. And then, just maybe, one rolls back around and makes you rewrite the piece that started the thing in the first place.

An example – one of the characters is younger, well-educated, and a little bit out of place in our setting. (To be truthful, they’re all a bit out of place, but that’s another story.) At first, it doesn’t matter – she’s there because she needs to be, and she’s well-educated because she needs to be. It was good enough to forward the storyline, and it worked. But she wasn’t at all satisfied with that. (Characters have

Silly Guys: Reducks

It is now only a little under a week until the Silly Guys take the stage in the new Curtain Call Café. Doug Wilder, Rex Daugherty, and I will be presenting the entire new Silly play that we have been working on for what seems like eternity.

Rex gets back from Ireland on Tuesday and then it is time for the Silly guys to do what we do best: work frantically for several days in order to make sure the piece is ready for the public eye. We have a leg up on ourselves compared to most of the Silly Guys shows because we’ve pretty much written the whole thing already. This is very exciting compared to last season’s workshops where we basically

Demolition Begins!

Today the renovation project at the Middletown theater jumped forward with the demolition of the two back storage buildings behind the theater. Watch the videos below to see it for yourself: 

Diary of the Raven: Introduction

Edgar Allan Poe is stalking me.

On a display in Borders earlier this week, I found a sizable display of “The Poe Shadow” by Matthew Pearl, in which a young lawyer tries to salvage the reputation of the deceased Poe.

Tucked in the New Releases section at Blockbuster, a large black bird stared malevolently from a movie called “The Raven”, in which a modern day singer named Lenore is visited by Poe’s ghost and stalked by a killer “from beyond the grave”.

I avoided both of them. Not because I’m afraid they’re not quality (OK, I’m pretty sure that the Raven movie isn’t, but we’ll let that pass), but because I’m trying

Autographs

After one of last week’s performances, children and adults alike gathered in the Curtain Call Café to get autographs from the actors of Forever Plaid, now in performance at Royal Phoenix in Front Royal.