Damn, I love projects like this, that take art out of the theater, out of the museum, out of the gallery, and brings it home to where folks actually live. I've been fortunate to be associated with a few projects like this in my career. In the late 1970s my labor play 1934: Blood and Roses was toured by the Portland Labor Players II, getting especially warm receptions in blue collar towns like Coos Bay, where a TV crew even waited on the outskirts of town for their arrival. When the State Fair banned the play for being too one-sided (it was a LABOR play!), there was such a statewide outrage, the story even making NPR, that they had to reverse themselves, and the play was done at the fair on Labor Day.
Later, in the 1980s, I toured my one-man appreciation of Woody Guthrie, Ramblin': the Songs and Stories of Woody Guthrie, and some of the venues -- a lunch room at a mill, a church basement, a barn on a farm -- brought the musical play to places where plays are not often done.
I don't do many readings but when I do them, I much prefer reading in the small towns of eastern Oregon to reading in Portland. Here readings are frequent, you can find several any day of the week; there, the entire town shows up. I haven't done any since the last Oregon Book Award tour for which I was eligible, but I usually jump at an opportunity to give a reading in the boonies.
Later, in the 1980s, I toured my one-man appreciation of Woody Guthrie, Ramblin': the Songs and Stories of Woody Guthrie, and some of the venues -- a lunch room at a mill, a church basement, a barn on a farm -- brought the musical play to places where plays are not often done.
I don't do many readings but when I do them, I much prefer reading in the small towns of eastern Oregon to reading in Portland. Here readings are frequent, you can find several any day of the week; there, the entire town shows up. I haven't done any since the last Oregon Book Award tour for which I was eligible, but I usually jump at an opportunity to give a reading in the boonies.
Weekend Edition Saturday, November 3, 2007 · When Paul Chan visited New Orleans for the first time in 2006, the gutted houses, abandoned streets and bare trees reminded him of Samuel Beckett's legendary play Waiting for Godot. "The sense of waiting is legion here," Chan said. "People are waiting to come home. Waiting for the levee board to OK them to rebuild. Waiting for Road Home money. Waiting for honest construction crews that won't rip them off. Waiting for phone and electric companies."
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