Blackberry

Last night’s performance of TONGUES WILL WAG was a fantastic gift from the audiences at ART–a wonderful full house, ready to hear a brand new story, and I thank you from the bottom of my heart for your generosity and time. We learned a tremendous amount about the show incredibly quickly, and I’m looking forward to the workshop performances at Berkeley Repertory Theatre and the Cape Cod Theatre Project later this year–it’s my hope that TONGUES WILL WAG will have a full production before the end of 2007, and we’ll keep our fingers crossed for that.

Birthing

Tonight’s the night–we do TONGUES WILL WAG for the very first time. I can’t think of a better way to end our residency at ART than this, nor a more exhilarating, terrifying one–it is always this way, tempered a little by the experience of having gone through it 9 times before with other monologues.

I got a lot of work done yesterday, but much remains to be shaped this morning and afternoon–the principal outline is pretty fuzzy, even at this point, and huge discoveries happened yesterday that upended much of the structure that had been growing in my mind. That sounds negative, but many disruptions are bigger than that, and so was this one–I’m grateful for the new insights, which leaped out of a conversation with Jean-Michele, and I feel certain at this hour that it’s a deeper, richer choice.

Two Weeks Later

Now that MONOPOLY! has had its run at ART, in the brief window before I fully turn to TONGUES WILL WAG, I thought I’d follow up on the events from two weeks ago. For anyone heartily sick of rehashing those events, please feel free to use the Power of the Internet and look at some lolcats instead.

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No, seriously–you do have free will. Last chance for lolcats.

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It’s an interesting coincidence–I had not been blogging about my work or life in any kind of traditionally “bloggy” manner for a number of years, and had embarked on a project to document this run at American Repertory Theatre when this all went down. I feel I’d be remiss if I didn’t give full weight.

Final Countdown…

It’s the final weekend of MONOPOLY!–it must close Saturday night, and everybody and their brother is coming out of the woodwork to see it after the Globe’s review, which I feel really builds on our earlier coverage. It must be said that there was no measurable bump in sales after the kerfuffle, which doesn’t surprise me–the incident was compelling for a number of reasons, but it didn’t connect with the actual work in a significant way.

Bostonist Review

Bostonist: Games Mike Daisey Plays:

Mike Daisey kicks off his monologue “Monopoly!” with the following statement: “I’ve always had a love for endless games.” And then a torrent of thoughts about the legendary board game of the same name come tumbling out of his mouth, and the game gets “bigger, weirder, and stranger.”

In the span of an hour and forty-five minutes, “Monopoly!” the monologue indeed grows “bigger, weirder, and stranger” as Daisey pulls together a number of loosely linked stories. Even though the story of Nikola Tesla, Daisey’s own tesla coil hi-jinks, Bill Gates lore, and the history of “Monopoly!” don’t seem to have much in common, Daisey’s stage presence whisks the audience from story to story.