Chickens - The Play. I’ve only read the first few pages, and it’s odd. Very odd.

I’m now officially a farmer. Long-time readers will know that I’ve dabbled over the last year, but it’s official now. This weekend, I bought a pair of overalls. At the feed store.

The response to my play has been overwhelmingly positive. I actually had no idea up until the first audience watched it how it would go over. I’m very, very pleased. For those of you far away and not able to come watch, here’s my director’s notes:

�[This Durang play] is so filled with non sequiturs that you have to do each thing with total conviction � if you try to look for a stream of consciousness like you would with any other playwright, it would just get in the way.� Thus spoke Dana Ivey, who first played the Nanny at the American Repertory Theatre. This is true for the actors; it is true for me as director; it is also true for you as audience member. Baby With the Bathwater is a challenging play for everyone involved. It�s not often you see such a play presented in Community Theater � these kinds of things are usually reserved for universities and edgy professional theaters � but I think it�s very good to do this type of show from time to time.

You are probably reading this before you�ve actually seen the show, wondering what I�m going on about. Christopher Durang is well known for taking an aspect of society and making us think about it by presenting extreme examples of how things could really be. His hit Sister Mary Ignatious Explains It All For You took on organized religion. This play takes on a topic that�s been brought to the forefront by politics recently: the family. And in true Durang style, we�ve been given a family that�s easy to laugh at because it�s gone so terribly, terribly wrong while simultaneously offending us for the very same reason. You point and laugh, and feel guilty for doing so. Even worse, you�re likely to spot yourself in some of what gets presented.

Durang hasn�t held back. Everything about family life is fair game. Some scenes you may agree with, while others may hit too close to home or make you angry. That�s good! That�s the power of theater. People used to riot, overthrow governments, and hold debates after watching theater. While I�m not advocating violent revolution, I am sad that the overwhelming majority of what we see today is weak �feel good� stories and mindless entertainment. And of course I don�t just mean live theater, but also movies and television. It�s good to see something provocative from time to time. It reaffirms what we are doing right as a society and point out areas where we could do better. Don�t be afraid, though � I think this is a mighty funny script. I hope you laugh a lot. It�ll only sting a little.

This is a small cast (especially by Town & Gown standards), but it took many more people than you see to make this show happen. I�ve tried to list them all in the credits (If you helped and I forgot to mention you, I�m sorry. Thank you so much for your help.), but a few people I need to thank more. I designed the set, but Ben Teague was able to take my ideas and build them. His ability to take scribblings on the back of a napkin and make something that works the first time continues to amaze me. Beth Kozinsky is my first-ever assistant director, and now I wonder how I ever went without. Bill Akin made business cards for everyone, helping with the publicity effort and making the cast feel like professionals. Steve Wildey and Amy Crow continue to be the best. Chris Johnson is beyond words. And the Cast. I asked them to attend two set calls, and they came nearly to all of them. I gave them a schedule made tight by the holidays, and they came out enough ahead that the final week was anything but stressful. They took my concepts and ideas and created characters that are (I�m certain) exactly as Durang intended. Thank you, everyone.

To many it’s just another dot-com going under, five or six layoffs lost among the thousands more going on around them. It’s dear to me, though. Pyra Labs, creaters of the Blogger software I use to maintain this weblog, is down to a company of one. Out of money and unable to continue as it had, co-founder and CEO Evan Williams is the only one left.

Blogger is just one of the several tools available to easily create and maintain a website such as this one, but it was my tool of choice. They’ve got about about 100,000 weblogs using their software – this one was number fourteen. Pyra created exactly what I needed, exactly when I needed it. There’s been some rough going as they tried to keep pace with demand, and it was clear from the beginning that eventually they’d run out of money, but they had what I thought to be the best thing going.

It wasn’t just the software that made the company dear to me. It was the human face they presented to the world. They started their company shortly after the company I work for did. We were about the same size. I could relate. But they were in San Francisco, sure to go far, sure to join the ranks of the dot com millionaires. I was in backwards Athens, Georgia, creating software for rural electric utilities. They were riding high, we were struggling to keep the doors open. I could live, through their eyes, a life that a few small changes, a few different decisions, could have given me. I connected with them in a way I’ve never connected with another company before. I wasn’t just a customer.

But of course, the times have changed. The bubble they were in has burst. Here in Athens, we’ve turned around, too. Turning a profit, even, with a solid future in sight. I’m still living multiple lives, though. My own, of course, and the one they let me live with their words. Thanks, in large part to their efforts, I’m living many, many more lives through the words of thirty or so more people, chosen from the hundreds of thousands of people now writing online journals and weblogs. It would have been much harder for me to find these people without the efforts of Pyra and the other people doing similar work.

I don’t need Blogger. I could do all of this on my own. But I like Blogger. I’m sad to see things end up this way. I wish them all the best of luck. And thank you for everything you’ve made possible.

The independant university newspaper has a write-up on my play opening tonight. The Red & Black is rather embarassing for a newspaper, but at least they got all the facts right.

My play has been written up in the local mainstream paper. Writer Mary Jessica Hammes does a good job, as usual.

A correction: yesterday’s vote wasn’t strictly along party line, just mostly so. Here’s a breakdown of the voting.

Work: mighty busy.
Life: extremely mighty busy.

Tonight is the last rehearsal without an audience. We get a preview crowd tomorrow, and then it’s the opening night extravaganza on Friday. It’s all coming together into a wonderful little show. Today, I had lunch with a class of university upperclasspeople (one upperclassman and a whole bunch of upperclasswomen) who had lots of questions for me about the show and directing and acting. It was like being on “Inside the Actor’s Studio”, but with food.

And just like that, Georgia has a new state flag. (link to picture of new flag) I never in a million years thought the Georgia legislature would act so quickly and painlessly. OK… I should be more specific. I never thought the Georgia legislature Democrats would act so quickly and painlessly. The legislature Republicans all voted against the new flag. The only thing the Republicans did, besides whine, is get “IN GOD WE TRUST” added to the design before they voted no.

I’d spent all morning diagnosing a bug in our software that just rared its head after hiding for months. I’d finally proven it wasn’t my doing and passed it on to one of the real programmers to fix, and now I was hungry. It was almost two hours past lunch time, and my tummy was feeling it. Especially since I’d slept until the last possible moment this morning and skipped breakfast. Before I decided what to do, a nice looking young woman walked into my office and said, “Would you like some chips and salsa from On The Border?” The powers that be continue to smile upon me.