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The Solo Show Movie Show

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I love the performing arts. I love film and theatre especially: great writing, snappy dialogue, intriguing stories, provocative themes. I also love to perform and write, whether for film or theatre. My next creative project is theatrical, a solo show, despite (oh darn) my MFA in film and many years tooling around in that form.

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I know film all too well. I could tell you how films are financed, who my favorite cinematographers are, what a grip and gaffer is, and on and on. I’ve hocked screenplays, tried to raise money for indie features, and had projects in development limbo. I’ve had good fortune and bad encounters in the film business. And yet today, I’m fully immersed in writing and performing a solo show. Something about that primal need for self-expression, and the immediate and meaningful experience that only happens between a performer and a theatre audience drives me.

Film and theatre share many common essentials. The early silent films told their stories with a static camera while action occurred in a proscenium frame. Movies and plays each stand on two strong pillars: dramatic narrative and performance of actors. Making a film or putting on a show are physically complex projects requiring immense commitment and participation of a cadre for even the smallest project to get into theatres.

The big difference for me, personally: the end result and the audience’s experience of that result. In fact, for theatre the “end result” is very much one and the same as the “audience experience.” Theatre, like any live performance, is electrified by that invisible wire between the performance onstage and the eyes and minds of those people out there in the dark watching.

With film, the point at which the performance takes place and is presented to an audience is miles or years away—decoupled, deconstructed, and reconstructed for the screen.

But is there a corollary between theatre and film around the solo work? I’m not talking about filmed performances like Spalding Gray in Swimming to Cambodia. How do you capture the internal monologue made real? The ruminations taking shape as a story unravels, told to an audience by one person on a stage? I’m at a loss to pluck any movie from the thousands I’ve seen that could possibly translate to the solo show I am working on.

Except maybe one.

How do you capture the internal monologue made real? The ruminations taking shape as a story unravels, told to an audience by one person on a stage? I’m at a loss to pluck any movie from the thousands I’ve seen that could possibly translate to the solo show I am working on.

I harken back to a short film I saw only once over thirty years ago, a vivid but curious memory.

It was back when I was new to NYC and just starting graduate school. I remember taking walks around the Village and serendipitously encountering scenes blending irony, amusement, street life, and that vital energy that is New York into some kind of indescribable experience. Snippets of people laughing while eating slices at Ben's Pizza; the shirtless, raw energy of basketball at West 3rd street; a soulful saxophone player leaning against a tree in a corner of Washington

Square. My eyes were opening to expression, art, and seeing a story told in real time as I made sense of it. I had no camera. I never wrote it down. I experienced it.

Around the same time, I saw a short by Wim Wenders called Reverse Angle at the Film Forum. I somehow connect this film to the solo show I am working on today. Why this film, which I only saw once? I had to look up the work because couldn't even remember the title until I finally spotted it with this description:

Reverse Angle was my first diary film. It is about “new wave music” (among others Jim Jarmusch’s Del Byzanteens), about straying in New York, about the editing process of HAMMETT in the presence of Francis Ford Coppola, about a novel by Emanuel Bove and about Edward Hopper. And somehow, the whole thing was a reflection about filmmaking in Europe and America.

The sensation I recall after seeing Reverse Angle was that Wenders had somehow captured what was going on in my head walking around the city.

This obscure non-narrative documentary doesn’t represent theatre any more than any other film. And it has little resemblance to the solo show I'm working out. Still, as I develop this material, popping from the busy streets to an open-mic night in the Village, going into some black box where I’ve assembled people to showcase the show, I perform and realize: I’m on to something. This is unique. This is creative. This is what I’m thinking. This is just me and an audience.

And for me, it doesn’t get any more immediate and meaningful than that.

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