I can never believe how fast all of this happens, or how intense the work is. I have had several sixteen-hour days in the past two weeks, but every minute of it as fulfilling as ever.
So Aladdin and the Enchanted Lamp is an interesting little story. Aladdin itself is pretty tame, except maybe for its racial profiling of Jewish merchants, it is pretty much just, well, weird. There is no tragic flaw and no one gets their comeuppance. Comeuppance is a Western thing, apparently. But cast a wider net and include the tale of Scheherazade, and you have one of the most derogatory stories ever to be explored by the workshop. I guess the ancient Arabians weren’t worried about being PC. Seriously, no group is left un-scathed by the story’s racism and gross negative generalizations about every single kind of person that appears. It’s also shockingly sexually explicit. Seriously, all the bull sex from the year we unwittingly chose the story of Dadealus, (not really thinking about the fact that his story is intertwined with Pasiphae’s story of bull lust) ain’t got nothin’ on the story of the vengeful king whose violence forces Scheherazade’s one thousand and one nights of story telling. The story is so far in the public domain it can easily be found on the internet, if you’re curious. But this smart group wasn’t much interested in all the crazy sex, no, they have chosen to focus more on the misuse of power, the all consuming desire for material wealth and the apparent message that it actually will get you anything you want, the way in which greed and wealth can destroy personal relationships but Aladdin never notices, and of course, the idea that all women should be beaten into submission. Plenty of grist for the mill!
And the work is hard, as always. As usual, the group working in a style that requires an over arching structure struggled to pin it down but found the perfect formula in the end, and the groups working in the less structured styles wrote too much and struggled at revising and cutting their writing in to short strong pieces. But the writing got done and we moved on to staging. If you’re curious about staging then you had better some see the show! Can’t give away all our secrets on the blog, now can we? Now the staging is done and we’re in the last week where we work to perfect things as much as we can in the time left and drill the pieces to create the kind of discipline that is required to put this kind of work in front of an audience (who may react in unexpected ways). It is only Monday, and things are looking good. I’m trying not to think about the other shoe dropping, as usually things are still looking more shaky, right about now. It could end up being a physical shoe, as we have had trouble getting the light board set up and last night a monsoon caused a veritable waterfall over our set of platforms and a ceiling tile to break mere inches form one of the assistant directors. Tech rehearsals are all tomorrow and Wednesday though, so hopefully I’ll have nothing but smooth sailing to report and my next blog can just be about how great the show is going to be! And, by the way, it is going to be great! I can already promise you that.
