WHEN: Thursday – Saturday 3/20-3/21, 7:30; Sunday 3/22 at 2 p.m.
Back stages are black places, where light is scarce and what light there is intentional, and mostly covered in plastic film that turns every precious bulb blue, or green, or red. When you look up back stage you could rightly expect to see crystals, and the gleaming sheen of moisture on dank and dark cave walls.
The back stage at the College is just a bigger back stage, the biggest I’ve ever been in. The “house” beyond the curtains (the flaps of curtain on the sides of the stage are called “pages”) is the largest I have ever played.
I look up at where the crystals might be, and I see the lines running aloft to masts too tall to see, but the cables are there, 37 taut pairs of them, running from where I could lean against them (I would never lean against them) up into the rigging where a ship’s top sails would be.
Yes, back stage is like that: a vast cave with the remains of Neanderthals and the animals they rendered in herds on cave walls; AND it is like a ship’s deck when there is no moon aloft, just a star or two.
I am an actor, and I stand here in the dark and quiet waiting to go on. If I want light, there is plenty ten feet away on stage. But the price to pay for light is to say lines. I go on in a minute or two. The lines I have memorized and will hopefully say are in the telling of a story fifty years old.
We – 16 actors, a Director, a Producer, a Playwright, a Stage Manager, an Assistant Stage Manager, the scene-changing crew, six figures in black, two Sound Men, the same two men for Lighting, Kathy in Wardrobe, a Photographer, and Publicity people I never met – are bringing to life an original play titled, Mendocino Stories; Instructions for a Broken World.
The Instructions are that when the world 3,000 miles away is falling apart, we will be here. I will be here and you will be here. So look local, and live local. Care local. Believe…..
The play was written on the spot, sort of. College students went out and interviewed people around the county, some they knew and some they didn’t, and those stories went into the show. Became the show. With a little theater thrown in; you know, actors forming up, taking shape, bouncing up and down like a hippy chick’s hard earned truck, the wind blowing back her hair and everything.
We see the hippy chick’s druggy boyfriend crash the truck, and all the bodies that had been bouncing and being the truck thrown free, a crash site, now on to the next memory.
Theater stuff. Making something from nothing. From themselves. Theater is all organic.
The hippy chick says she can’t go on. That living even in the beautiful woods on nothing, can’t last, doesn’t work, not for her. Even back in the day, not for her. She loves her life like she loves her boyfriend, her wonderful, addicted boyfriend, but he won’t last and neither will she.
She decides first.
The character I play was a boy in Potter Valley, going hunting up the mountain at “six years old,” being followed by a “troop of cats.” He carries a “little .22.” He will be gone “all day.” He will shoot what all farmers let their kids shoot, some even paying the kid next door to come over and shoot “ground squirrels, blue jays, woodpeckers. No songbirds.”
But time gets in these places, doesn’t it. And passes. Into the black places where we wait our turns to perform; into the ageless, gifted present, the youth that there is so, so much of; the valley and the mountain that is right outside the door.
“A couple bad grades” in high school and his parents sent him to a military academy “down in Marin,” where they learn “how to take apart an M1 Grand – that was the WW2 rifle – in the dark.” And he learns how much he hates war.
It becomes 1970 and the army and the draft wants to put a sniper’s rifle in his talented hands, make use of his trained eyes, send him to Vietnam where it sends so many “big, strong farm boys……that don’t come back.” I won’t tell you the end. Not here.
There are 15 or so such stories in the play. Come hear them. True stories, and we are of them. Mendocino Stories from down the road and over in the valley, and if not that valley then the next; of arrival and how and why; of home like crystals on the night-dark walls, when all light is precious.
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