Always have mixed feelings about the last day of the residency.  We’re excited to hear the presentations; we’re also sad, though, that the residency is over.   Page 73 generally is made up of a team of 3 – Liz, Asher and Dan.  But, during our residency at Yale, the team explodes to about 20 people.   It’s always a little bittersweet having to leave New Haven and get back to our three-person model.

Moving on.  It was great to hear Cory Hinkle’s Little Eyes and Kara Corthron’s Spookwater.  Davis McCallum (who directed Little Eyes) and Kip Fagan (who directed Spookwater) did tremendous work on these pieces.  Davis really managed to extract the creepy-funny aspects of the play; the actors (Dane, Jenn, Erica, Carter, Barret) were unbelievable.  And Kip helped bring to life the expansive world of Kara’s pre- and post-Katrina New Orleans with the contributions of percussionist John Corkill’s and the versatile actors (Teresa Lim, Nondumiso Tembe, Aja King, Aleta Mitchel, Trai Byers and Ben Horner).  Really, the plays couldn’t be more different – yet they’re both similar in that they depict societies in transition (Little Eyes’s post-9/11 Big Brother world and Spookwater’s New Orleans).  (Ed. note: So great that we were joined by board member Allison Blinken, who took some lovely photos!)

We’ll miss New Haven. We’ll miss everyone who worked with Page 73 this past week.  But we’ll be back to New Haven, for sure, and will continue to soldier on, hoping to work with each member of our 20-person Yale Residency family.

Trai Byers and Ben Horner

Nondumiso Tembe, Teresa Aviva Lim and Aleta Mitchel

Kip Fagan and Asher Richelli pre-"Spookwater" presentation

Just another day at our Yale Residency: Both Kara and Cory did rewrites of their respective plays this morning.  Kara mentioned that she and the percussionist started scoring some of Spookwater while Cory and Davis excitedly proclaimed that, yes, they did work on the end of Little Eyes – and it’s terrific.  To borrow Mark Sanford’s favorite adjective, it was a “glorious” day – both because the weather was amazing and everyone was productive. We ended up at the Yale Cabaret’s summer production of Irma Vep in the evening and followed the performance with an early night to bed.  Some of us needed a full night’s sleep.  (Ed. Note: The last pic shows Cory, Sam, Dan and Liz very excitedly looking at a YouTube of couples who choreographed their first wedding dance as a light saber duel.  Apparently, this is very common in certain parts of the galaxy.  There were, like, 20 or so videos of *different* couples using light sabers in their first dance as a couple.  Also, there was a very elaborate Star Trek wedding that they found online.)

Cory and Davis discuss the new pages of "Little Eyes"

Dane and His New Pages

"Professor" Jenn Lyon explains it all to Erica

Walking back from lunch with Jennifer Keiger and Amy Boratko of the Yale Rep, we ran into this gem:

Whirlwind activity.

Arrivals continued.   Kara Corthron and Kip Fagan (who opened a play at SPF last night) joined us and started work on Kara’s new play Spookwater.  Some pretty spectacular Yale Drama School students are working on Spookwater (Trai Byers, Ben Horner, Aja King, Teresa Lim and Nondumiso Tembe).  Aleta Mitchel, who was in the original production of Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, is in the cast.  A Yale School of Music student (John Corkill) is doing percussion for the workshop of Spookwater.   We can’t wait to hear the work that Kara, Kip, et al. do on this new play.

We all met at Bru Bar this evening for pizza, beer, and conversation over music from a very good jukebox (The Beatles and Big Hair 1980s bands?  Good times. )  I mean, what better way is there to celebrate our residency in New Haven than enjoying pizza, which allegedly (we don’t believe it…) was invented in New Haven?   David Adjmi joined us for slices and beer and some of us had late-night drinks at a bar called “The Anchor” with playwright Kate Walat and composer Greg Spears (who is talking to 2008 P73 Playwriting Fellow Tommy Smith about possibly writing an opera based on the Tchaikovsky and his wife).

And we’re back!  In New Haven!  At Yale!

The sudden afternoon showers did not deter playwright Cory Hinkle, director Davis McCallum, actors Dane DeHaan (of Sixty Miles fame), Jennifer Lyon, Carter Gill, Barret O’Brien and Erica Sullivan and our amazing producing associate Dan(iel) Hammond from putting in about 4 hours of work on Cory’s new play Little Eyes.   After a brief introduction, we left the Little Eyes folks and walked over in the rain to grab coffee and talk shop with Sam Hunter about the play that he’ll be working on while at Yale and his numerous other project (this man is busy). I don’t think it’s fair to say much about Sam’s new play – he only has a couple of pages written.  Here’s the brief (very dry) description of the piece that we included in the welcome packet distributed to all residency participants: “… the play… [is] about a woman who pledges to continue work on her husband’s book on genocide in the XX Century after he inexplicably commits suicide…”

Rehearsals were followed by dinner at our favorite Thai restaurant (Bangkok Gardens), where  much Singha Beer was consumed.  Five of us (Cory, Dane, Dan(iel), Sam and Asher) headed over to Bru Bar for more beer (this time, we opted for pitchers of the house pale ale and “damn good stout”) and more talk of Sarah Palin, the Michael Jackson (never-ending) extravaganza, summer blockbusters (Up gets thumbs-up; Transformers not so much) and theater in Minneapolis.

Tomorrow, the Spookwater crew arrives: playwright Kara Lee Corthron, director Kip Fagan, 6 amazing actors and 1 percussionist.

Also!  David Adjmi was spotted crossing a street near the Yale Rep; word is that Kate Walat is in town; Tory Stewart (from our first summer residency at Yale) is trekking over on Friday; and Heidi Schreck (fingers crossed) is magically going to appear on campus on Saturday.  Crazy.  We’re so having our very own Michael Jackson extravaganza when everyone reaches New Haven.  Tory Stewart is on “I’ll Be There” and Heidi Schreck will duet with David Adjmi and belt out “Dirty Diana”.   Take that, Joe Jackson.

Congratulations to Kara Lee Corthron for receiving this year’s Princess Grace for her play Holly Down In Heaven!  We’re so thrilled and excited for her.

In unrelated news, Molly Rice (one of the participants in this year’s residency and playwright extraordinaire) just posted a really lovely and interesting entry on the Kenyon Review blog.  She’s up at Choate working with teens.  What she’s doing is truly fascinating.

We had a cold reading of Tommy’s Beautiful Night - which is about Leon (we referred to him as “Lev” – ooh) Theremin and his wife Lavinia Williams.  The reading featured Bruce, Alex, Tommy’s friend Nena Mediah (who is a Bat).   And it was pretty great to hear it.

Then, we all went out for our last night in New Haven to good ol’ Sullivan, which during our halcyon times at Yale, used to be called “Cavaugh’s”.  The group split up (shockingly!) into smokers and non-smokers.  Do people actually still smoke?  Apparently, they do.  Seriously.  Lots of smokers at Yale – every other person walking through cross-campus seems to smoke.

Tomorrow is our last day.  We’re also going to have presentations of Brett’s The Revival and Molly’s Firehouse 17. 

At dinner, Kara (Manning) talked about the difficulties of juggling her freelance gigs as a music journalist and her career as a playwright.  She talked about that rare thing: The ability for an emerging playwright (any writer, really) to focus entirely on her writing without the distractions of deadlines from a paying gig.  It’s tricky.   She kept saying that her time at Yale was a real luxury.  She then expressed concern that no one else would understand what she was talking about — she was worried that she sounded like she was talking “Icelandic”.  Not really.  Her story is all too familiar.  It reminds why this type of residency (any residency really) is so important for writers.  It also reminds us how badly we wish we could fully fund our playwrights and provide them with enough resources – anything! – so that they can just sit down and write, research, do whatever they need to do to move on to the next play, rewrite any play, or just think about a play — to do it all without having to run to that temp job to make ends meet.  Basically, we want to turn our playwrights into trust fund babies. 

We’re organizing the first read-through of Tommy’s newest play (Beautiful Day) tomorrow.  It’s in the evening.  The play looks at the relationship between Leon Theremin and prima ballerina Lavinia Williams, who was a member of the American Negro Ballet.  

And now a word about our fall production…

At an impromptu gathering in Kara-Lynn and Molly’s apartment, we got the run down on everyone’s day.  Kara Manning wrote in her apartment the whole day; she only left for a couple of minutes to buy a salad.  That’s dedication.  We are a bit worried about Brett, though, whom we haven’t seen in over 24 hours.  When we asked him to join the festivities last night, he replied that he couldn’t tear himself away from his computer and was in the middle of a writing spell – he then added that the invitation allayed any neurosis about being left out from residency festivities.

We were going to join the after-gathering at a nearby watering hole called Sullivan’s but general fatigue and age sent us back to our apartments for an early-ish night (10:30 PM – that’s actually late, no?  We thought so.).

We woke up to rain, which turned out to be a good thing.  Everyone got a lot of work done.   Twenty pages from Molly, apparently – and, according to Brett,  a productive day in the rehearsal room with Jack and the actors.  The actors in The Revival are actually getting a full day off tomorrow so that Brett can focus on rewrites.  In the meantime, Molly, Kara-Lynn, Terri, John, Teresa and Marguerite are going to explore the very new pages of Firehouse 17.

Kara and Tommy arrived this afternoon.  Tommy’s a bit jet-lagged; he just flew in after two and a half weeks in Prague.  We tried to indoctrinate Tommy (and everyone else) into the mysterious ways of Mory’s, but alas T– was too jet-lagged to join us.  Brett also was unable to join us since he’s hard at work on The Revival.  Kara sipped a glass of white wine while we passed around a cup filled with the suspicious libation of assorted colors – she left us before we closed out Mory’s so that she could go write.  And Molly only joined us for the tail-end.  In the meantime, Jack, Caitlin, Alex, Kara-Lynn, Terri, Marguerite, John and Rachel braved the ritual, cups and merriment that accompanies an hour (or two) at Mory’s.