Unvarnished sneak peek

In which our Diva sends season's greetings from Lizzie Siddal in Nice, 1855

The first staged reading of Unvarnished has come and gone, followed immediately by a lower back strain that limited my time in front of the computer, and immediately after that by, y'know, Christmas.

The turnout was small but enthusiastic, I learned that it's still too long and I must kill more darlings (seriously, folks, even I don't want to talk for two hours straight on purpose!), and our hosts at Side Street Studio Arts were super helpful and supportive. Onward and upward!

One of my Christmas gifts was a nifty little flexible tripod for my smartphone, which leaves me with no more excuses for putting off that vlogging I keep saying I'm going to try. (Not sure the handful of video diaries I did with my old flip camera really count, though I suppose I could lay claim to being an early adopter, since I'm pretty sure they actually predate the term "vlog." *g*)  Now that Unvarnished is not only written but most of the way toward the final version that will be produced, I have plenty to babble about -- including far more detailed background than could ever have fit into a 90-minute show, and maybe some outtakes from earlier drafts!

In the meantime, a sneak peek at said script (though most of the words in this snippet are Lizzie's own):

Hope everyone has had a very happy holiday season, and looking forward to a bright New Year!

Something in the water in Geneva

In which our Diva gives thanks that her Frankenstein castmates made everything such fun backstage

Frankenstein Official Quote List
GreenMan Theatre, Fall 2014

You can be in various stages of beverage... ness.

Let's have you pout again. That was good.

You're just kind of frantic piano-ing, so you don't notice him right away.

She's a great governess. She's the best. And you really did have a frog situation with the other one.

If you're not Victor or the Creature, you can take five.
 - Am I the Creature?
 - If you don't know if you're the Creature or not, I can't help you.

So fight your natural instinct to get up and punch them in the face right away.

Walk it off. She's going to die. You just got beat up.

You're Enlightenment guys. You think you know everything because you read a book.
 - I read two books, thank you very much.

Any inappropriate audience reactions will be dealt with by the Creature.

I feel bad for Victor, but I hate him too.
 - Ding-ding-ding! You get to lead the talkback.

I made you a present.
 - I made you a playmate. He's in the park waiting for you.
 - Totally in keeping with the period. Handmade presents.

And once the set's built, the first time you smack your head on that wall will remind you.

Did we do this part yet?
 - No. Be careful.
 - Kung fu Frankenstein.

Easiest scene transition in the entire show. Except for the giant tarp.

I think Bill & Ted might have paid a visit and dropped their shoes off.

What am I doing?
 - Trying to comfort the crazy man.
 - Same as always.

Now let's do one "happy, fun, before everyone dies."

Let us talk of happier times. Things. Topics. Three T's.

And then I realized that someone was talking about watching Dexter's Laboratory when they were little, and I was sad.

No! No amount of torture? Line.
 - Yep.

Thank you, son. I will go and inform your wife. Uh, your future wife. Your bride.
 - That's the one.

Justine and Elizabeth, you learn about this conversation, and you can feel about that however you feel about that. Disgruntled is one option.

I wrote in big letters "Victor and Creature up." Because you both love the floor.

Whose body parts are these? Why hasn't CSI been invented yet? We can pay them in Toblerone and clocks.

Elizabeth, you're next. We're going to kill you now.
 - What about Henry?
 - Oh, yeah, Henry!
 - I'm going to live.

Dying is great. Keep doing it.

I think that will work better once I figure out where to touch her in a nice way.
 - Yes. We don't want any sort of lawsuits.

So in a... appropriate for Dad, and yet also, like, kind of locker-room way.

The Creature has an extra body part.
 - It's your purple appendage.

Go to the end of 7. Victor beats Effie. I mean Elizabeth. That's a different scene that I didn't write.

This guy said, "You look like Tina Fey," and I was like, "You're too old for me. Do you have a grandson?"

Why couldn't you get, like, a whole person and bring him to life?
- Well, that's no challenge!

I finished punching and I thought, "Oh, I wonder where I went with that? Well, it doesn't matter now."

My keyword for a crushed windpipe will be a lot of wheezing.

You're sort of period-esque moving while carrying a bench. And if that's not vague enough for you, I can try to make it a little more unclear.

That time I was listening for the knap. I have been growling. I like growling. Growling is fun.

That felt kind of weird.
 - It looked weird. I think it's because your foot got hooked on her boob.
 - If I had a nickel for every time somebody said that...

At what point in that do I die?

I've been saying, "I've been riding a horse for forever. Is this Felix's family?"
 - You'll notice that I'm walking weird. It's not just because I'm Spanish. I've been riding a horse.

I think you can enjoy his bad Spanish a little more. You already are, but you can be like, "Oh honey, we don't need to talk."

We speak the universal language.
 - Polish.

I wrote lots of kissing notes tonight. We'll work on it.

People will get it. And the people who don't, that's fine. Their friend will explain it to them in the car on the way home.

Warm up your slapping hand.

Ben's doing this reaction of "Oh, my hand came from a dead guy. That's gross. Oh, and this one too. That's also gross."

Henry, your grossness is still awesome. Keep it up. Literally.

It can get a little shouty. Then it's like, "I have rage! Don't you have rage? Yes! I have rage!"

Erick, you need to learn to use a blanket. Or maybe it's Frank.

Early is on time. On time is late.
 - Late is dead.

He's trying to defend you, but it's not working very well.
 - Yeah, you're supposed to be poking me.
 - I'm not into poking anyone.
 - It's against my beliefs.

You're so friendly. I'm too hungry to be friendly.
 - As long as you don't actually eat the people you're greeting, it's all good.

You sing like a bird. A vulture.

Becky, are you ready to get your face beat in?

Do you sweat?
 - He sweats on the inside.
 - I sweat on the inside and then I spit it all over Erick in our fight scene.

I think Val should go on just like that. Nothing says intimidation in the courtroom like a tank top and curlers.

I didn't care for Romper Room. It was too educational.

Everything has changed. The show is now a musical.
 - Ohhh, sweet mystery of life, at last I've found you!
 - That's now the jail scene.
 - Hey, I'd be way more scared of Madeline Kahn than some random thug with a stick.

It's all your fault. You made me kick my own butt.

Unfortunately, most of the sound and light cues are cued off of violence.

Ahh. Oh, my knee. Ahh.
 - Oh, come now, you're a better actor than that.
 - Ahh.
 - We're gonna have to shoot him.

I'm waving the grey flag.
 - It's like, I'm kind of giving up. I sort of quit.

I'm telling lies to the child. What else is new?

Keep the bottles for Foley purposes.
 - Keep the bottles for killing.
 - I actually said "Keep the bottles for Foley," not killing. But killing is just as accurate.

Don't pace behind me.
 - I'm not pacing. I'm staring.

Yeah, that would be me leaving my brain in my other pants. Or rather my pants in the wrong place.

You've never looked at your scalp before?
 - Not close enough to see freckles.

Twenty-seven.
 - Thank you, 27.
 - Sorry. Fifty-seven.
 - That's better.
 - Thank you, heart attack.

I was tempted, but I never seriously thought about it.
 - About what?
 - Punching someone.
 - Hunting someone?
 - PUNCHING someone.
 - Oh, I thought you said hunting someone.
 - That's a whole different level.

You want to do some highlights here so you can see the breakage of his head.
 - "Breakage of his head" is a phrase I really only want to hear in very specific circumstances.

I died? Nobody told me this.

Look what I found in the back.
 - Yay! More death!
 - More death bottles.
 - I'm going to have a fear of water bottles after this.

Why are we sitting on Duard?

She spent the whole week going "Thursday... Thursday..."
 - I'll kick his ass on Thursday.
 - And you know Mr. Val was like, "Honey, what's wrong?"
 - I haven't beaten anyone up in DAYS.

Do whatever you need to do to bring extra energy.
 - Should I eat all my Halloween candy?
 - I recommend doing that AFTER the show.

Thank you for washing my super-gross shirt.
 - Oh, yours was nothing compared to Erick's.
 - That was my excuse to myself.

Why didn't you make a puppy, seriously? Or, like, a chimpanzee.
 - Yeah, science starts with small animals. You should have made a slug.

And I saw it for the dumbest reason. I'm seven years old, and I saw Alan Rickman, and went *clutches heart*.
 - Y'know, Becky, that tells us so much about you.
 - It really does.

I'm going to tell her she's the cat's meow, and she's going to tell me I'm the cat's pajamas.
 - I love cats! And pajamas!

What if they canceled the show because someone couldn't get a shoe on?
 - That would be...
 - Ridiculous.
 - It would be a one-shoe show.

Erick, you've been e-Victored.
 - Wow.
 - You have no idea how much joy that brought me.

I will find you a water.
 - But only the green ones.
 - Don't start with me.

Looks like a greatcoat.
 - Well, it's good. I wouldn't call it great.

I already came up with a way that everyone could be happy. Except Justine.

Hey, Rachael, you used to be on my side. What happened?
 - I was never on your side. Sorry.

This isn't working.
 - You have to work for it.
 - I did. I gave her four mints for it.
 - That's not work. That's bribery.

I feel naked without at least eyeliner.
 - See, I feel naked without clothes, so I usually wear those.

Well, you had that look on your face like, "First I'm going to find out how you're doing, and then I'm going to destroy your day."

You should wear that out there. Be like, "I killed Victor."
 - I killed him for the hat.
 - I wish you never went to University! Bang!

That might not be the right show.
 - What show would it be?
 - Harvey.
 - See, I'd give it to my family, and my dad would be like, "Well, he said it was an adaptation."
 - I created a giant rabbit. He's invisible.

Now do you see the dangers of this game?
 - There are no dangers. I've only been hurt once, and that was when someone interfered.
 - True. And that someone was your mother.

So your version of flipping the bird to your mother is stealing all her chocolate and bringing it to us.
 - Yes. Also, she told me to.

The spark of life

In which our Diva plays dramaturg as Victor plays God

Just got home from an encore screening of the National Theatre's amazing Frankenstein, which I was lucky enough to see on my UK trip in 2011. Still one of the most satisfying experiences I've ever had in the audience of any theatre, and it was lovely to revisit that experience as well as see it in new ways courtesy of the expert filming.

Once there, I kicked myself for missing the opportunity to give out postcards for the entirely different Frankenstein in which I'm currently performing, which has been equally amazing in its own way, even if we can't afford several thousand light bulbs and a turntable/elevator. I did give the website info to some lovely geeky ladies sitting nearby; I do hope they come check us out!

It's been particularly gratifying to log my first actual credit as dramaturg, after years of diving down the research rabbit hole at the slightest provocation. And then there was the delight of watching Cory Sandrock's fantastic brand-new script evolve through two developmental readings, one of which afforded me the privilege of reading the delightfully developed role of Elizabeth. I have smaller roles in the full production, but they're still lots of fun, and I had a great time creating the lobby display too.

With a steampunk slant and some truly stunning performances, you really don't want to miss this one. If you come out Halloween night (with a delayed 9 pm start to let all the little ghouls and goblins get home and start in on the sugar coma), there's $5 off if you come in costume.

Hope to see you there!

Frankenstein runs through November 9. Visit the GreenMan Theatre website for more information.

Mermaid-like awhile they bore her up

In which our Diva's much-delayed dream project draws ever closer to reality

It's been over a month since I scrawled the words "END OF PLAY" in a spiral notebook, and just over a week since I typed the same ones into Celtx. Over a decade since the idea first hatched in my little brain, Unvarnished: A Portrait of Elizabeth Siddal is finally becoming an actual coming-to-a-stage-near-you solo theatre piece.

It even has a Facebook page, for which the wonderful Pre-Raphaelite social mediasphere has already garnered 161 Likes. I'm in contact with a venue for the first public reading, which will likely be in November or December in Elgin, and mulling various logistical considerations for touring the fully realized production.

With all that going on, of course I picked today to have a eureka moment about Ophelia's dress.

That's not entirely out of left field. In my text, the dress is the springboard for a little flight of fancy while Lizzie poses in the infamous tub, and it's always been important to my mental image of the show. But the details craved by my obsessive little costumer's brain (which couldn't help being a bit disappointed by the sad greyish thing the mostly gobsmackingly gorgeous Desperate Romantics put on Amy Manson; the designer for Emma West's Ophelia short film seems to have given it a little more thought, albeit on a restricted budget), are tantalizingly thin on the ground. Millais himself recorded in a letter that "To-day I have purchased a really splendid lady's ancient dress - all flowered over in silver embroidery - and I am going to paint it for 'Ophelia'. You may imagine it is something rather good when I tell you it cost me, old and dirty as it is, four pounds." (The Tate Britain educational info on the painting estimates that this would be about £250 today.)

Now, it didn't take too long to decide that a 20-something guy's idea of an "ancient dress" -- even if that 20-something guy is a genius painter intent on getting his masterpiece absolutely right -- is likely to be defined fairly broadly. In all likelihood, we're talking about something kept in a trunk for a generation or two before it found its way to the secondhand shop where Millais found it.

Which somewhat remarkably gives us more to go on than the painting itself, in which the distortion of the water makes it nigh impossible to discern much about the actual shape of the garment. That said, the shape does appear to be relatively simple, which lends further weight to the likelihood that it dated to the first couple decades of the 19th century.

The advent of machine-made net at the close of the 18th century paved the way for the early-19th-century fashion for gowns of muslin overlaid with embroidered net, often in gold or silver thread. So I've been working for a long time under the assumption that the Ophelia dress fell into that category, as typified by this gorgeous specimen at the V&A.

However.

The place I've always been tripped up is the neckline, which is clearly a couple inches higher than is typically found on this type of dress, appearing to cover Lizzie's collarbones. It's one of the few structural details we actually can see in the painting...

...or so I've always thought.

That eureka moment I mentioned? Follow the red dotted line:

Yup. Right there in front of me the whole time: the actual neckline of the dress, outlined in reflective bluish highlights.

At first I thought maybe he painted the actual neckline, then altered it to look more medieval and/or better represent Ophelia's virginal innocence for his contemporary audience. But the more I look at it, the more I wonder what that lace flounce around the top of the V&A dress would look like if it were flipped up and clinging to its sopping wet wearer. I suspect it'd look a lot like this.

So, that's that direction settled on. Too bad I hemmed and hawed just a little too long about that perfect vintage sari on eBay; I probably could even have used the choli for the bodice! Ah, well. I'll just have to look around some more. Darn. Shopping. ;-)

Ice Bucket Challenge

In which our Diva chills out in support of combating ALS and related diseases

Over five years ago (I got it wrong when I said four in the video), Spinal Muscular Atrophy took my brilliant, wacky, wonderful friend Abby away from us at the age of 33. With that in mind, I'm making "Ice Bucket" donations to both the ALSA and MDA.



The closing line of my blog post linked above was inspired by Abby's stated belief that any and all fanfics -- whether or not they had anything whatsoever to do with Stargate -- should end with the phrase "And then Teal'c took off his shirt." With that in mind, I have to think that wherever she's watching from, this is her favorite:

Houston, we have a draft!

In which our Diva reaches a noteworthy milestone

There's still a whole lot of work ahead of me before Unvarnished comes to a stage near you, but I cannot begin to tell you how sweet it was to scrawl these words this morning:

Meanwhile, another intrepid theatrical look into Lizzie's life is about to debut in New York. Be sure to check out Shakespeare's Sister Company and their imminent premiere of Kris Lundberg's Muse.

The quality of mercy

In which our Diva has been doing some listening and pondering

Being acquainted with a number of industry people on the other side of "The Pond," as well as a fan of various British TV fare, I've had quite a few conversations in the last few years that touch on the differences in acting education and career shapes between the US and UK. The broadest is that over here, we're much more likely to be specialists, whereas traditional British drama-school training assumes that you'll be doing a bit of everything -- theatre, film, TV, and what is arguably the most specialized in this country, audio.

British friends are often surprised when I explain that straight-up, studio-produced radio drama has been absent from American airwaves for decades, with a few NPR offerings recorded in front of live audiences as the closest thing that remains. Happily, there's been a resurgence of the form in the explosion of podcasting. Nobody could have predicted the runaway popularity of Welcome to Night Vale (which, after listening to it for nearly a year, I still think is most conveniently described as "News From Lake Wobegon with Cthulhu mythos," though that doesn't quite cover it), and the likes of Pendant Productions and Decoder Ring Theatre are making a pretty respectable showing too.

Meanwhile, though, Auntie Beeb never stopped putting original drama on the radio, and these days you can stream or download a lot of it online. (Unlike most of their video, BBC iPlayer radio programming can be played outside the UK.) Some programs are also delivered by podcast; I've been subscribed to the one for the Drama of the Week for a while now.

Which is how I came to find Porcelain: The Trial for the Killing of Sophie Lancaster (sadly not currently available) in my digital media library in March. It sat there for weeks on end, un-listened-to, for precisely the reason it turned out to be even more interesting to me than it otherwise would have been: I was in the middle of rehearsals for The Laramie Project, and wasn't quite up to another dramatization of a hate crime against a young person by other young people.

How far would you go to find your soul?

In which our Diva will be heard but not seen, and is totally okay with that

Exciting news today! Voice of the Vespers, the independent sci-fi feature for which I did the opening narration and some other voice acting, will premiere in just four weeks' time!

I think I've posted the trailer before, but it's super shiny and I'm bursting with pride for writer/director Matthew Van Howe and the whole cast and crew, so here it is again:



The premiere will be held at 9:30 pm Friday, May 30, at the Classic Cinemas Ogden 6 in Naperville. Tickets are just $5. Check out the deets over on the Classic Cinemas website.

Please come on out and celebrate with us!

And all that we can be, not what we are

In which our Diva assembles another inspiration playlist

If you've been around me or my blog long enough, you know I usually put together a playlist for my theatre or film projects, of music that, for whatever reason, strikes the right emotional resonances for my character's journey. With The Laramie Project's ensemble nature -- eight actors playing 60+ people -- I had to approach things a little differently, and came up with a mix that speaks to me of the play as a whole.

Since there have been a number of songs directly inspired by and/or dedicated to Matthew Shepard (at least 61, as collected by JD Doyle at Queer Music Heritage, whom I thank profusely for sharing the fruits of his research online), I could have made multiple CD-length mixes of those alone. Paring them down to the handful that made the cut -- alongside other music that resonates with the play for me -- was a highly subjective process, and I encourage you to check out the whole collection on the QMH page.

In the end, this is what I came up with (click on the title to buy the track and support the artist!):

Randi Driscoll, "What Matters" - Written in 1998 in response to Matthew's death and released as a single to benefit the Matthew Shepard Foundation. Not only is it lovely and haunting in its own right, it spared me the agony of choosing what version of "Amazing Grace" to include.

Meredith Brooks, "Bitch" - Both on her website and in her book The Whole World Was Watching (which would be an amazing read even if I weren't in the midst of interpreting on stage several people in her life), Romaine Patterson describes this as Matt's favorite song and recalls him singing alternative lyrics they made up.

Peggy Lee, "Run For The Roundhouse Nellie" - The closest thing my research could turn up to Marge's "Run  for the roundhouse, Minnie." Either she knew another version of the song (more than possible), or she just substituted her mom's name and it stuck that way in her head.

W.G. Snuffy Walden, "One Will Fall By the Way" - It might seem weird to include a selection from the soundtrack to The Stand, but Matthew's murder coincided with a period when the Sci-Fi Channel seemed to be running the miniseries every two or three months, so it's part of my emotional wallpaper from that time. This track is the fullest realization of a melody that crops up again and again, always underscoring the inextricable tangle of sacrifice and hope. As Tom Cullen might say (and as I can't help thinking of every time I hear Doc O'Connor's "H-O-P-E" speech in The Laramie Project), "M-O-O-N. That spells hope."

Tara MacLean, "Evidence" - I discovered MacLean's album Silence at a record-store listening station (remember those?) in Bozeman, Montana while on a theatre tour in 1997, and the CD was still in heavy rotation in my listening habits when Matthew's murder dominated the news in late 1998. This particular song has always resonated with the event for me.

Melissa Etheridge, "Silent Legacy" - Etheridge actually wrote a song dedicated to Matthew (one of several titled "Scarecrow" in reference to Aaron Kreifels at first mistaking the unconscious Matthew for a scarecrow when he found him), but this raw, heartrending classic was the one that cried out to be included.

Andrew Spice, "Matthew" - One of the songs I discovered through the Queer Music Heritage page that particularly spoke to me.

Colleen Sexton, "Scarecrow" - Another gem from the QMH page. I decided I should really only have one song with this title, and with all respect to the great Melissa, the choice was a pretty easy one.

Elton John, "American Triangle" - I figured I probably shouldn't cross off all the big stars who wrote songs for Matthew. Sir Elton won the toss.

John Denver, "The Eagle and the Hawk" - I grew up on John Denver, and this song in particular feels like home, like my mountains. It was one of the first songs I chose to include, as a representation of the particular Western sense of the land that crops up several times in The Laramie Project. When I read on Romaine Patterson's FAQ that Matthew liked folk music, "John Denver and shit like that," it instantly became the centerpiece of the playlist.

Dashboard Prophets, "Ballad For Dead Friends" - At the time of Matthew's murder, Buffy the Vampire Slayer was already a surprise hit but not yet a game-changing cultural phenomenon. Its soundtrack is a handy source to mine for a bit of the indie-rock sound of the late 90s, and if it seems incongruous with TLP, remember that it's a modern parable of how ordinary people, particularly young people, can work together to save the world.

Indigo Girls, "Galileo" - I don't really have an explanation. It just feels right.

Sarah McLachlan, "Angel" - In honor of Angel Action, and a nod to Matthew's struggles with depression.

Jessica Weiser, "After the Rain" - I think this is my favorite among the many beautiful songs I discovered through the QMH page.

Magdalen Hsu-Li, "Laramie" - Much like The Laramie Project, though in a different way, this one is about the murder rebounding on the town, at least as much as it is about Matthew.

Jewel, "Hands" - "In the end, only kindness matters."

Orchestra of St. Lukes, "After Laramie" - From the HBO film version of TLP.

Brian Stokes Mitchell, "Make Them Hear You" - As much as I love Ragtime (read: a lot), this one wouldn't have occurred to me on my own, but it seemed obvious when I ran across this video about the Ford's Theatre production of TLP and heard it sung at the vigil they held on the 15th anniversary of Matthew's death.

Sarah McLachlan, "Prayer of St Francis" - May we all be instruments of peace.

deal with what is true from divababble on 8tracks Radio.

The lights of Laramie

In which our Diva returns to GreenMan Theatre in rather a change of pace

This is probably the latest I've ever blogged about an upcoming show, but that's partly because we have a bit of a compressed rehearsal process before our April 4 opening..

With a play like The Laramie Project, that's a lot of emotion packed into about six weeks.

In the fall of 1998, when Matthew Shepard's horrific murder captured the world's attention, I caught the news coverage in between rehearsals for the production of Macbeth I was directing in Columbus, Ohio. In New York, playwright Moisés Kaufman and company members of his Tectonic Theater Project prepared to travel to Laramie and, ultimately, create a very different narrative from the one constructed by the 24-hour news cycle.

The play is assembled from over 200 interviews with the people of the town, as well as public-record texts and journal entries by company members. That last category of insight, as woven into the show's opening moments, reveals the chroniclers' own prejudices and apprehensions about what kind of people live under the wide high-plains sky. About what kind of welcome they might find.

I can't help chuckling a bit at those passages, but I can't blame them either. They were city-bred strangers, some of them gay, venturing into the relatively small town where a young gay man had just been beaten to death. More than that, they had been inundated with the same media narrative as the rest of the country, the one that turned the romantic literature and folklore of the American West inside-out and hung it up as ironic backdrop to darker truths.

It's a narrative I know all too well, and one that sets my teeth on edge every time it finds its way back onto my TV. Every time the worse angels of human nature manifest themselves somewhere in the vast portion of this continent so often dismissed as "flyover," the old romantic notions are trotted out and tied to the pillory for the mocking, as if no one has ever challenged them before.

Those people over there, far away from us in our enlightened sophistication. There is the stagnant pool where society's diseases fester, the ignorance and hate that infect our world. Those rednecks, hicks, zealots, bigots, so foolish as to be surprised when these terrible things happen there.

As I watched the news from Laramie unfold, my shock and grief at what had been done to Matthew Shepard sat alongside distaste and growing resentment for the way the story was being told.

Yes, I said "resentment," and I chose that very personal word deliberately. From sixth grade until I moved out of my parents' home, I lived in Bennett, Colorado, some two hours south and east of Laramie, with less than a tenth its population. Wikipedia will tell you it was home to "Colorado Spam King" Edward Davison and to the late Tim Samaras of Discovery Channel's Storm Chasers.

It will also tell you, in a single dry paragraph, about Bennett's fifteen minutes of national attention a few years ago, when the elementary school music teacher faced firing for showing her first graders a 30-year-old episode of the PBS series Who's Afraid of Opera? It won't tell you about the most ignorant possible quotes plastered all over the news reports, from people (not all of them even parents) hand-wringing over  the subject matter of Faust as if the kids had seen the entire opera instead of a sanitized excerpt.

It won't tell you how sad I was to read those news reports and be reminded forcefully of a similar kerfuffle the summer before my junior year of high school, when plans to implement a "global education" curriculum were scuttled by the outrage of parents, largely stoked by John Birch Society activists from out of town who turned a public forum about the issue into a circus. Not enough of one to catch national attention, but a Denver news team did drive out to grab a few sound bites. School hadn't started yet, so I think they were just looking for B-roll of the building when the cheerleaders came out of practice and gave them some (as I recall, from my 16-year-old perspective) pretty succinct and cogent comments about the misinformation going around.

When the segment aired that evening, though, the one and only resident who appeared was a woman saying "Well, I think it has a Communistic or a Satanistic background," and the tone of the entire piece was "Look at this backward, benighted town." So when "Operagate" came around years later, and all my arts friends were looking at the coverage and shaking their heads, I didn't much relish the awkwardness of simultaneously standing up for my former hometown and being sad that such reactionary elements can still disrupt everyone's lives there.

Bennett is lucky: It's had its embarrassing media moments, but not because anyone died. The humiliation of Laramie on the world media scene, the painting of an entire community as backward and destructive and rotten, the implication that everyone was as culpable as the actual murderers, shook me on a level I still can't adequately express.

Fear makes monsters, and fear is learned. We learn from our community. There's no disputing that, and no disputing that the vein of fear and hate that made monsters of Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson was mined from their families, their community. Their world.

But the "let's all shake our heads at the benighted hicks" narrative places their world somewhere outside our own. It encourages us to believe we're different, to sit back in our self-righteous blue-state complacency and ignore the tar pit of unexamined assumptions and privilege bubbling under the foundations of our own homes.

Kaufman and his colleagues did a brave thing in turning away from that narrative and seeking the truth. The people of Laramie did a brave thing in agreeing to share their truth, with all its awkward pointy angles, with yet another set of strangers with tape recorders. Between them, they created something that isn't easy or tidy, that sometimes presents more questions than it does answers. They created a way to tell the story as it was, and as it continues to be.

In The Laramie Project, Father Roger Schmit, the priest who hosted the first vigil for Matthew Shepard as he lay in intensive care, urges the company members interviewing him to "deal with what is true... You need to do your best to say it correct."

I'm humbled and honored to be part of telling that story.

The Laramie Project runs April 4-13, 2014, at GreenMan Theatre in Elmhurst. Details and ticket information can be found at their website.

Nesting instinct

In which our Diva has been putting her winter restlessness to work

As you may have noticed, or at least heard (and heard, and heard, and heard -- the meteorologist on the local news sounds very tired of having to say this stuff!) it's been an awful lot of cold and snowy lately. Now, yours truly -- despite being made entirely of northern European barbarian DNA and having moved to Chicagoland on purpose -- is not a fan of this winter business. Not one little bit. Well, maybe a little bit. A couple weeks of pretty fluffy snow viewed from the nice warm indoors would be fine.

But what's going on this year is more than a little wearing, and I've been combating it by tackling some long-overdue rearranging and organizing and decorating. My house dates to 1908, an American Foursquare that the former owner (a contractor and carpenter himself) updated in all the right ways, keeping intact its beautiful Craftsman woodwork, including the dining room built-in with its original leaded glass.  I fell in love with it the moment I walked in the door just over nine years ago, and promptly dove into research, dreaming of how to bring out its historic character before even making an appointment with a home inspector.

Other pursuits always seem to take precedence, of course, and for the most part those dreams go unrealized. But in the last couple weeks, I've mostly finished overhauling the spare bedroom, a process that started several months ago with expanding the existing shelving to accommodate the lifelong collection known as Val's Personal Doll Army.

Along the way, I've done a lot of thrift shopping, a little painting of shelves thus acquired, some rejiggering of the closet configuration, and spent basically a whole day sitting on the floor devising a new filng system for sheet music that wll actually keep it neat this time, darnit! (That last resolution will be helped by the sad fact that Elgin Opera is no more, which means I'm not tossing another concert's worth of pages on the "I'll put that away later, really I will" pile every few months.)

Probably my favorite design inspiration is one that didn't cost a dime: A pair of vintage blue suitcases that belonged to my grandparents brought up from the basement and stacked into an instant nightstand that perfectly suits the height of the bed and the color scheme and quirky cottage feel of the room.

With only a few small details left there, I've turned my attention to the bigger challenge of organizing the basement, which includes my sewing room and new (and for the moment somewhat makeshift) recording studio for audiobooks. It's not as creative and fun as taking a room and making it pretty and welcoming, but it's the logical next step (at least in the way the house and the stuff in it all goes together in my head) necessary before making the rest of the rooms as pretty and welcoming as they deserve to be.

It'll be a while, for instance, before I can even consider anything involving paint in any way, let alone anything on the order of what latter-day Pre-Raphaelite muse, artist, and blogger Grace has created in her Catty-Corner Cottage. (Hubby and I have been saying from the beginning that this house deserves a name, but we've yet to come up with one. Maybe that'll finally arrive this year too!) Especially the Twelve Dancing Princesses (one of my favorite fairy tales too!) in procession around her dining room walls.

On both that blog and her wider-focused one Domythic Bliss, one of the things I love is how much of it involves making your home fairy-tale beautiful with everyday resources. The trade-off for not spending a lot of money is time, of course, but for many of us that's part of the fun.

When William Morris designed Red House, both money and time were involved, not to mention the talents of Morris' illustrious circle of artistic friends. Recent conservation work has uncovered ever more of the extensive decorative painting throughout the house, including some figures thought to have been painted by Elizabeth Siddal.

I'm not far from that phase of Lizzie's life in writing Unvarnished, and am just realizing how I've set up for it in some sections that talk about their paintings as a world of their own creation. Red House was a truly an entire little world of Morris' own creation, realized with the collaboration of his wife Jane and their friends. (A Twitter conversation last week with Dinah Roe reminded me that there's a great deal that needs to be said about Jane's artistry with an embroidery needle and how it gets largely ignored, but that's a tangent for another day.) What an amazing way to fill hours and walls! Sounds like a party to me.

Funny thing -- when I was fifteen, and all this Pre-Raphaelite and Arts and Crafts obsession was still several years in the future, I got it into my head that I wanted to paint a full-wall mural in my bedroom. By that time we lived in a house we owned, after most of my Air Force brat childhood spent living on base, so it was technically not out of the realm of possibility.

Of course, no sane parent is going to turn a fifteen-year-old loose on an innocent expanse of white interior latex, but someone (I don't remember whose idea it was now) came up with the brilliant compromise of tacking up an old white sheet with plastic sheeting behind it. I spent a good chunk of my summer filling it with a rainbow, pot of gold, and flowers, and loved every minute. Once it was finished, I could wake up every morning, put on my glasses, and look at the big window onto a world I had made with my own hands and imagination. Kitschy and derivative imagination, sure, but all mine.

It was an amazing feeling. Making something special always is. I'm hoping to have that feeling a lot more by the time I've finished realizing the dreams for my grownup Arts and Crafts haven.

Speaking of making special things, here's a footnote more related to the previous post: Last week, on a Wombat Friday whim, I put together a "Wombat's Lair" Etsy treasury for the enjoyment of the Earnest Damsels Collective and other wombatophiles. One of the featured crafters, Isobel Morrell of Coldham Cuddlies, messaged me a lovely thank-you for the inclusion, and shared her coinage of the phrase "a wonderment of wombats," (as well as some nifty insights into her crafting process) having decided that the standard group noun, a mob, just wouldn't do for the purposes of her adorable plush creations. I have to agree, and have resolved to refer to our Wombat Friday assemblage as a "wonderment" forever more.

Wombattitude

In which our Diva is a most earnest damsel

It's Wombat Friday again, and high time I gave it a nod in this blog! In one of the sillier corners of the Pre-Raphaelite blogosphere (adjacent to such delights as Raine Szramski's Pre-Raphernalia cartoon series and Chiara Moriconi's chibi Rossettis and muses), each Friday sees an increasing array of plush wombats posed with (mostly) Pre-Raph-related books, prints, and objects, not to mention the occasional tea and/or cake. Cake is important. I finally joined the party in September; you can check out all of Lady MacWombat's adventures over on Google +.

As the brilliant (and often unashamedly silly) Kirsty Stonell Walker explained more thoroughly in this blog post, this meme came about as a lighthearted commemoration of one of Dante Gabriel Rossetti's many eccentricities, the small menagerie of unusual animals he kept in the garden at Cheyne Walk, of which Top the Wombat was somewhat famously the most beloved. (I'm not sure whether it was Top or one of the other wombats who departed this mortal coil 100 years to the day before I was born; unfortunately, the poor things were all doomed by yet another iteration of Gabriel's enthusiasm exceeding his practical knowledge. Which is disastrous enough when painting murals, but genuinely tragic when living creatures are involved.)

This bit of fun has its detractors (also brought to my attention by Kirsty) for reasons none of us are quite able to take terribly seriously, due not so much to the original blog post as to the anonymous commenter who demonstrates that a sad little dudebro fanboy crying "fake geek girl" is always recognizable as such, regardless of idiom or area of interest.

Mr. Anonymous, however, did unwittingly hand us the newest in the collection of varyingly unofficial names for our inclusive association, which already included the Pre-Raphaelite Sisterhood (somewhat more official owing to Stephanie Pina's wonderful site by that name) and the Wombat Collective. Mr. Anonymous wrote disparagingly of us as "these earnest damsels," and so -- after we collected ourselves from fits of giggles on the floor -- the Earnest Damsels Collective we became. I've been down with the flu all week, so I totally blame the fever for opening up Photoshop and pressing Rossetti's The Bower Meadow into service to represent us.

In any event, as Wombat Friday passes its first birthday (as observed by Stephanie in this post, complete with an archive of everyone's Wombat Friday photos from 2013), let's celebrate the furry and fabulous, literary and loopy, gloriously and goofily Pre-Raphaelite little critters who brighten up the end of our week.

It's more fun than a barrel of wombats!

The wolf is waiting

In which our Diva sees a little action

Just after Christmas, I got a Facebook message from Nathyn Masters: "Are you available Friday or Saturday?" I've worked with Nate on a couple projects, including his epic supernatural action feature Epitaph: Bread and Salt (which, in cast you missed it, you can view in its entirety on YouTube), so I happily went pretty much straight from traveling to getting my Black Widow-esque assassin on to shoot some enigmatic scenes for him with gifted actress and good friend Anita Nicole Brown, as well as meeting some new-to-me faces among what I've come to think of as the TimeCode Mechanics Rep Company.

This was a bit of an experiment, cooked up in Nate's fertile brain during a break in production on his main current project, The Perfect Letter, with no script and minimal direction. I was given the gist of what I should communicate in improvised dialogue, as well as a nice little chuck of Nate's signature comic-book-style fight work.

A few days later, it had a title - Crisis Function - a Facebook page, and a trailer:

I still know only as much as this will tell you about what it's about (and yes, I felt a little bit like I was back in the Resonance-verse - definitely in a good way!), but I'm looking forward to seeing it all play out!

Lizzie steps out on stage

In which our Diva is only a little jealous that it's someone else's Lizzie, and is happy to cheer from the sidelines

It's been a couple months since a Tweet popped up in my timeline that made my heart skip a beat, announcing "Lizzie Siddal, a new play." I don't even recall now who I saw post it first, though it was likely the lovely Stephanie Pina, who has given us both LizzieSiddal.com and The Pre-Raphaelite Sisterhood. But in any case, there it was in all its official glory on the Arcola Theatre website, complete with promo photo of its Lizzie, Emma West, in front of Ophelia with flowers scattered in her hair.

Damn, I couldn't help thinking in those first moments, somebody beat me to it. The irrational impulse of "Hey, that story is mine!" is of course completely ridiculous, but I'm as human and vain as the next creative person, so I'll admit I had to work through it for a minute there. I'll also admit to being greatly relieved when it became clear that, while Emma West was the only cast member announced right away, Jeremy Green has in fact written an entire play with other people in it, quite different territory from my solo piece in (slow-but-progressing) progress.

Even if it hadn't been, of course, in the end excitement about Lizzie's story being explored on stage had to triumph, and I very much wish I could be there. It's funny -- when I first had the idea for Unvarnished, over a decade ago now, when I first started getting mental images of stage pictures that have proven so challenging to build into words, the Pre-Raphaelite circle and their art were still just being rediscovered by the public -- especially here in the U.S. -- after decades out of favor.

These days, any given person with even a passing interest in 19th-century art is much more likely to know who I'm even talking about, let alone the lore of Ophelia's bathtub and that late-night exhumation. The images and stories have made their way back into pop culture, aided by an Internet that bears only the slightest resemblance to the nascent wilderness it was back when I happened upon a review of a one-woman show about Lizzie by Orange, a French multimedia artist who had worked with Cirque du Soleil (and whose somewhat generic pseudonym makes it impossible to find any hits for her on today's Google, if any still exist).  I was just starting my research then -- with Lucinda Hawksley's marvelous biography and so many other resources still in the offing -- and happened on an email address for Orange, resulting in a very kind reply that I wish I could still find, wishing me well in finding "your Elizabeth." I've carried that thought with me ever since.

I've not read or seen Kim Morrissey's Clever as Paint, but I've known it was out there for a while, and apparently there's also one from around 1999 called Dear Dove Divine. Still, it's thrilling to see a new play put Lizzie at the center of her own story, and to see it getting such great coverage, including this BBC News piece and Dinah Roe's interview with playwright Jeremy Green over at her great blog Pre-Raphaelites in the City. There's also this nice audio interview with Emma West from East London Radio.

April Love by Arthur Hughes

All this has also prompted a thoughtful blog post from Kirsty Stonell Walker over at her always-worth-reading The Kissed Mouth, about the ways in which the story is so often reduced to a few tragic episodes. It also puts me in mind, by way of contrast, of a couple conversations I've had recently regarding how little there is to read about Tryphena Foord. My conclusion that "that's what a long and happily married life will get you" might be facetiously phrased, but I stand by its essential accuracy. "Arthur Hughes married his muse and they lived happily ever after" is pretty much all we get.

After reading Kirsty's post, I feel a bit guilty always referring to Lizzie by her nickname, but I can't shake the familiarity. Anyway, guilt hasn't made me write Unvarnished any faster (as I've said before, I'm a busy actor and an unreliable writer), and in fact was pretty much what kept me paralyzed for a long time, for fear of what all these people I like and respect might make of my interpretation of events!

I've mostly managed to shed that, as about 75 handwritten pages of draft can attest, so now all that's left is periodic fretting about whether I'll still be believable on stage by the time the thing is ready to perform. *wry g* I don't have Emma West's uncanny resemblance to begin with (though I have had my share of unprompted comments over the years to the tune of "Hey, have you ever seen that Ophelia painting...?"), and I won't be carded beyond my time forever. (Though a hardware store clerk did ask for my birthdate before ringing up a can of spray paint last week, so I'm probably okay for a little while longer.) It will be what it will be; all I can do is forge on and hope people find it a story worth telling.

In the meantime, if they're in London starting next week (as I so very much wish I could be!) they can take in the story told by Jeremy Green, director Lotte Wakeham (of Matilda the musical fame), and a bright young cast who have been lighting up Twitter with their enthusiasm during rehearsals. It's been fascinating learning about the development of the project, and the collaboration of playwright and actress through a short film about the painting of Ophelia and on to this full-length play. I hope it's a great success, and look forward to reports from those able to attend!

Emma West and Tom Bateman  in rehearsal as Lizzie and Gabriel

Lizzie Siddal runs November 20 - December 21, 2013, at the Arcola Theatre in London. Click here for details and ticket info, and/or follow the production on Twitter.

Crew members your indie film needs

In which our Diva has noticed some consistent oversights

When I encounter someone visiting a film set for the first time, I can almost guarantee they will say something like "I had no idea there would be so many people! And they're all working!" I've heard it on big studio productions, and I've heard it on little student films with skeleton crews, relatively speaking.

The latter end of the scale is a necessity of minimal budgets, of course, but sometimes filmmakers let those crews get a little too skeletal. And I'm not entirely convinced that is a necessity. People doing double or triple duty is one thing. Entire areas of responsibility left to more or less fend for themselves is quite another. This list is in no particular order (mostly because the impact of the lack of someone doing a given job will vary by production), and by no means guaranteed complete, but these are the gaps I've noticed time and again.

Costume Designer. Okay, I said "no particular order," but this is the one I would probably be doing if I weren't an actor, so I get soapboxiest about it. Clothes do not just happen. Your clothes, what you are wearing at this moment, did not just happen. You might or might not have thought about the reasons you bought those particular pieces (or why someone bought them for you), and why you pulled them out of the closet or drawer this morning, but there are reasons all the same. Making a film is creating a world and the people in it. In order to do that, someone needs to figure out what clothes those people would own and wear, and why.

In the microbudget world, you're probably not making a detailed period film (and if you are, you'd better have at least a year to set aside for pre-production -- Team Witchfinder, I salute you!), and you're almost certainly not looking for someone to build a bunch of clothes from scratch. What you need is someone who pays attention to clothes and what they say about people, knows how to shop (especially thrifting), and preferably has a good sense of color. If you have no budget for wardrobe, that same knowledge is what they need to guide the actors to plunder their own closets effectively. Because I'm sorry, directors, but the vague guidelines I get the vast majority of the time? Rarely result in anything resembling the image you have in your head. And I know this stuff. A lot of actors don't. Directors don't have time -- or, often, knowledge -- to work out all the details of how to make a look happen. That's why they need costume designers.

Separate Director and Producer. That thing I just said about "directors don't have time?" It's going to be a theme here. There are exceptions to every rule, and if you're super-detail-oriented and driven, you might be one of them. But chances are there's a whole swathe of business and organizational stuff you dread having to deal with. That's because it's supposed to be someone else's job. Especially if everyone involved also has a day job. Riding herd on all the artistic stuff and the business stuff AND a day job? Will send pretty much any director to the hospital. That's why they need producers.

Script Supervisor. Another one that tends to fall to actors. Which, aside from the energy drain of keeping track of our own continuity, is just supremely uncomfortable in the chain-of-command sense. When everything is ready to roll and everyone is looking at me, I feel super-extra-squirmy holding up my hand and saying "Um, wasn't his jacket zipped up before?" or whatever, because it's not my job. It is, in fact, perilously close to telling the director how to direct, which is the biggest actor no-no in the universe. But unless a director has a flawless eidetic memory, sooner or later some detail is going to fall through the cracks in the course of making the big picture happen. That's why they need script supervisors.

Grips and PAs. Lots and lots of grips and PAs. Unless you are physically tripping over people in every direction (and, depending on how close the quarters are at your location, sometimes even then), there is no such thing as too many hands. Some directors take pride in participating in the grunt work, and that's awesome. I applaud that. But they can't direct the actors and hold a reflector at just the right angle and fetch fresh batteries and hold coats for actors pretending it isn't 30 degrees and make coffee and keep the gawkers out of frame and turn the noisy heater on and off and fetch extras from holding. That's why they need grips and PAs.

Makeup and Hair. Insert a lot of the same stuff I said about costume designers. Just because you don't need special effects doesn't mean you don't need knowledgeable people in charge of what your actors look like. Sure, most actors go around every day looking reasonably presentable, but most of us know sod-all about how to translate that for the camera, or how to look a way we normally don't. And a smart director knows that -- as with costume design, and a whole lot of other things -- it takes skill to present something in a way that the audience doesn't notice or think about it. That's why they need makeup artists.

But where do I find these people? If you have next to no budget, it's a serious question. In which case, if you don't already have one, you really need to start with that producer. That's when it's important for that person to be good at finding answers to things. Like "What does the person doing this job need to know?" and "Where should I look for someone who knows those things who might be willing to pitch in?" If you know people, you probably know people who can do these jobs. Organized and detail-oriented? Ask them to be script supervisor. Makes the rounds of all the thrift stores in the area once a week? Sound them out about costume design. Somebody's cousin is a Mary Kay distributor? Talk to them about makeup.

And of course there are scads of indie filmmaking forums, Facebook groups, and so on. On many of them, any post actually looking for crew (as opposed to spamming self-promotion) will get noticed and get responses. Obviously it's better if you're paying (even if it's just a modest stipend), but if you genuinely absolutely can't pay anyone (most definitely including yourself), there's someone out there who'll be interested in doing it for fun.

In all seriousness, if you can't find people to fill all the jobs a film really needs filled, I urge you to seriously consider whether you should be making this film right now. If you wait and do it right, if everyone has a great experience on your set because it actually felt like a team working together to make an awesome thing, if it's not a desperate shorthanded effort to just get something, anything, in the can so we can all go home and put this nasty business behind us? Not only will you have a better film at the end of the day, but you'll have a bunch of people who would work with you again in a heartbeat, will refer their friends the next time you need crew, and will proudly support and publicize your baby.

Boo!

In which our Diva has a tale to tell and a song to sing

GreenMan Theatre Troupe, where I've had some great performing experiences in the last several years, sponsors an annual storytelling workshop with veteran storyteller Carolyn Thomas-Davidoff.  It culminates in a "Spooky Stories and Songs of the Season" program for one weekend only. This year, things finally worked out for me to participate, which means this Friday and Saturday, October 11 and 12, I'll be one of a about a dozen performers spinning traditional tales, urban legends, literary adaptations, and a few haunting tunes for good measure.

I have two selections on the program. One is a short story by Chicago writer Jenna Waterford, "Beata Beatrix," which was published a couple years back in the Hugo Award-winning speculative fiction magazine Electric Velocipede. The title comes from the painting by Dante Gabriel Rossetti -- or rather, several paintings by the same name and of the same subject, one of which resides at the Art Institute of Chicago. With that in mind, Beata Beatrix got my "favorite" vote on #PRBDay, and I was far from the only one, since it ended up at the top of the list when the Tweets were counted. I'm looking forward to the next issue of the Pre-Raphaelite Society's quarterly journal, which I'm told will include an article on the various versions of the painting.

Jenna and I met online and bonded over our mutual love of Pre-Raphaelite art and Lizzie in particular, so I love having the opportunity to adapt her chillingly beautiful story for oral telling.

by Evanira on DeviantART

I'm also over the moon to have permission from fantasy author and singer/songwriter Seanan McGuire to sing her eerie reinvention of Red Riding Hood, "The True Story Here." I've been itching to perform it since the first time I heard it on her album Wicked Girls, and this is the perfect time and place. If you've seen Catherine Hardwicke's gorgeous film starring Amanda Seyfried, you might have an inkling where this Red is coming from, but Seanan's songwriting makes for its own unforgettable take on the tale.

Fingers crossed that I do both these terrific writers justice! If you're in Chicagoland, come and see/hear for yourself this Friday and Saturday. There's lots more spooky wonderfulness on the program -- ghosts and vampires and mythical spirits galore. Tickets are just $5, at the door or online. Hope to see you there!

Day of the Witch!

In which our Diva is witching it up, and she's not alone

Exciting day in Diva-land! Witchfinder premiered today on Popcorn Horror and MyIndieShow. Popcorn Horror is a free app for Android or iOS and we're their "Short Fright Friday" selection for this week. Check out the nifty minimalist poster they made to go with it!

Over at the MyIndieShow link, you can stream or download Witchfinder, as well as a growing catalog of other indie creations. (And you can "show love" by clicking on the little blue heart/reel thingie at the top left of the main movie graphic, even if you don't watch on the site.)

When we were shooting last November, we had no idea we were contributing to something of a zeitgeist moment, but by the time Pamela J. Grossman took to HuffPo to declare 2013 "The Year of the Witch," they seemed to be everywhere. Just a couple weeks after her essay was posted, I watched Oz the Great and Powerful on a flight out to California and Beautiful Creatures on the flight back. I'd already caught the former at the cinema, but missed the latter, which turned out to be well worth seeing for more than just the jawdropping adult cast (Emma Thompson, Viola Davis, Jeremy Irons) the filmmakers lined up. The metaphor might not be the subtlest ever, but I'm all for a teen audience seeing a girl stand up and refuse to be irrevocably branded either madonna or whore.

As Grossman noted, the fall TV schedule is downright witchtastic. Her sampling didn't even include the new series I'm having the most fun watching so far, Sleepy Hollow, whose reinvented Katrina Van Tassel Crane has done most of the explaining about her faction of witches and their evil opponents despite being trapped in a spooky interdimensional limbo. (And this is the supporting female character. The made-entirely-of-awesome-ness of Nicole Beharie as Abbie Mills is off the witchy topic, but can't go unremarked.)

I feel a certain kinship with the tween fans of book series like Beautiful Creatures; my own favorite book through middle school was The Witch of Blackbird Pond. (Even though -- spoiler alert -- it involves no actual witchcraft.) My first (and probably favorite) directing gig was The Crucible.

So in the Year of the Witch, it's pretty darn cool that there are witches, witches everywhere... and one of them is me!

The Mom Zone revisited

In which our Diva spotlights a certain category of supporting character

A couple years ago, I hit a threshold in my acting career - the one where you start playing moms, and really never stop until you start playing grandmas. Since I don't have kids in real life -- and, due to the vagaries of genetics, was still frequently being asked where I went to school up until very shortly before that (and have been carded more than once since!) -- it felt weird. Really weird.

I've since gotten over that initial weirdness in the process of playing Busy Single Mom, Updated Fairy Tale Mom, Wholesome Civil-War-Era Mom, and Slightly Nervous Suburban Mom. Sure, it's great to be the lead once in a while, and women -- particularly mature women -- need to be more often, and in more varied ways. There should be more than this set of supporting roles out there for my type and age bracket. But that's a much larger discussion than I'm tackling today, and it doesn't change the fact that these roles, for all their limits, can be much more varied and meaty than we sometimes think.

Which is how I came to tweet last week, only semi-jokingly, that as long as I'm spending so much of my acting time in the Mom Zone, I want to be the Hollywood Midwest answer to Lena Headey.  Seriously, though, the last few years have seen this lady take on three, count 'em, three high-profile characters who function in their respective narratives primarily as mothers -- but you sure as heck can't say she's in a rut.

First, of course, she stepped into Linda Hamilton's iconic shoes as the ultimate "mama grizzly," Sarah Connor, on the TV spinoff Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. Sarah started out (as seen in the original 1984 movie) an ordinary working-class girl, not long out of high school, who waited tables and went out dancing with her not-long-out-of-high-school friends, until one night Kyle Reese dropped out of the sky... er, future and informed her that her yet-unconceived son would be the only hope for the survival of the human race. Caught between trying to give John a childhood and preparing him for the brutal realities he would face as an adult, she made everything up as she went along, trusted nobody, got really really psychologically damaged, ended up more dangerous than most of the machines, and never ever, not once, failed to be riveting to watch.

Then of course, there's Game of Thrones' Cersei Lannister, defined primarily as mother -- particularly after Joffrey takes the throne and promptly derails any plans Cersei might have had of doing any actual reigning as Queen Regent -- but also as wife, sister, illicit incestuous lover, and most of all as bitter, viciously resentful product of a pseudo-medieval fantasy society's strictly enforced gender norms. She hates the role that's been thrust upon her but plays it to perfection and to whatever advantage she can gain, coping with an apparently endless royal wine cellar and a nasty pastime of mocking her intended daughter-in-law for believing and sincerely doing her best to embody the ideals of highborn feminity they've both been raised on. She is, by and large, an awful person who does awful things, and the show would be much poorer without Headey's sly, snarky performance.

Currently on multiplex screens (for the moment, anyway; the box office hasn't exactly been all they hoped for) -- and setting off this whole thought process -- we have Jocelyn Fray in The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones, who belongs to a subset of mom-dom that I'd quite like to take a crack at: the Unexpectedly Awesome YA Mom.

YA (for those who don't hang around the same people and blogs I do) stands for "young adult," and refers to a segment of the literary market primarily intended for teens. It's on my radar primarily as an arena where female authors are thriving and young female readers are finding a welcome breadth of young female characters driving their own stories. (Even more breadth would be great, of course, and it would also be nice if, say, publishers didn't go around slapping whitewashed cover images on the few books that do star PoC protagonists, but that's another topic getting important discussion elsewhere, and not my topic today.)

It's also on the public's radar, to the extent that it's a well Hollywood has been drawing from quite a bit the last few years, ever since Twilight caught them off-guard as a juggernaut franchise and finally brought to their attention the fact that teenage girls and young women have *gasp* actual, legal-tender money they quite like to spend on movie tickets. (The merits, or lack thereof, of said franchise are also beyond the scope of this particular post, and quite frankly I'd be happy to never see another comment about them as long as I live. Just so we're clear.)

Being girls, of course, the things they like can't possibly be actually worth anything (for a nice summary of that particular cultural meme and the problems with it, see this interview with YA author Sarah Rees Brennan), but their money? Ah, that can move mountains of calcified industry conventions. Or at least budge them a little.

But the thing I've been noticing as these movies based on YA (and middle-grades; let's not overlook the number of cars hooked to the Hogwarts Express here) books come out, even more than the fact that a lot of them have girl protagonists, is that said protagonists' moms are often some seriously awesome characters in their own right.

Now, mostly I'm familiar with the fantasy ones, because that's the genre I'll always gravitate to by default, regardless of the age bracket of its intended audience. So I don't know how much it holds for YA novels in other genres. But YA fantasy novels are often some variation on the "destined hero" narrative, with a protagonist who discovers some fantastic heritage kept hidden throughout her/his childhood. With that structure in place, Mom almost has to be involved in said heritage somehow, as a keeper of knowledge if nothing else. And she's often a lot else. (See also: Virginia Doyle, mother of Gemma, protagonist of A Great and Terrible Beauty and its two sequels, a property I would dearly love to see adapted to film even though nobody is going to let me play Virginia. Which I would love.)

Which brings us back to Jocelyn. Who was apparently even less prepared than Sarah Connor to raise a kid with A Destiny, since it's pretty clear that she had no opportunity to learn how to raise a kid at all. The secret society of Shadowhunters and their solemn duty to hunt demons with their special innate badass abilities seems great and all, until the younger (and more prominent) characters start telling you what it's like to actually grow up in that world. Which Jocelyn did, and there's a world of interesting in whether it was a good idea to keep that fact (and by extension a lot of other facts) from her daughter Clary, the central character. Like Sarah, she made up this whole parenting thing as she went along, and she got a lot of it right and a lot of it wrong, but at the end of the day she and Clary love each other ferociously even while they're arguing, and it's a beautiful thing to see. (Also, she's hell with a cast-iron skillet. That fight sequence is worth the price of admission all on its own.)

Mom's role is unquestionably a supporting one, but this week-plus later, I still find myself thinking a lot about it, even though the movie overall is kind of a hot mess, albeit one assembled from a lot of interesting bits.

I'm not sure what the point of all this musing is, except that I'd love to see more of this kind of story, and this kind of character, in the indie milieu. There's plenty of room for it, given that, for example, the YA properties picked up for big-budget adaptations are uniformly led by pretty white straight girls. It would be great to see Hollywood fix that, and I'm all for continuing to talk about how to get them to do so. While that inevitiably arduous process continues, though, I'm looking for the indie community to step up first and show them how it's done.

So how about it, indie filmmakers? When I look at the Chicago/Midwest casting breakdowns on Actors Access tomorrow, what kind of moms will I see? Stay tuned...