NEWS
July 27, 2010
I'll be reading a Jeeves and Wooster story by P.G. Wodehouse at "Story Time for Grownups" next week -- 7:30 p.m. at Grendel's Coffee House, East 8th and Burnside. More information here.
The 20 performances of "The King and I" closed on Sunday, July 25, after a highly successful run. Many sold-out houses in the 600-seat Deb Fennell Auditorium at Tigard High School enjoyed the sumptuous production. The children's theater production of "Aladdin" (six performances) also had a terrific run from July 14 through 17. I will put together pages with description and photos for each of these productions shortly.
Book Drum, the literary Web site based in London for which my profile of Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes won a 100-pound prize back in March, put my second profile, of The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera, online on July 22. The next books I plan to profile for Book Drum are Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (the basis for the movie "Blade Runner") and Joseph Heller's Catch-22.
On Wednesday, July 21, the creators of "Coup de Théâtre" hosted a wrap party for cast and crew at El Presidente Mexican restaurant in Vancouver, Washington. We got to see about 20 minutes of scenes from the film, which is midway through post-production (editing, sound and color adjustment, composition and application of the musical score) for the late September deadline to submit to the Sundance Film Festival.
The makers of "Coup de Théâtre," Sean Parker and Austin Hillebrecht, also helped me shoot a video audition for a traveling production of "Spring Awakening," the 2006 rock musical based on the 1891 German play (very scandalous in its time) by Frank Wedekind. We shot it in an hour in the basement of Austin's home in North Portland, with Sean handling the camera and Austin feeding me my cue lines, and it was online on YouTube the following day. It's not perfect, but for a quick-and-dirty, self-directed audition, it's not bad at all.
I reviewed a new book by a local author, Zach Dundas, The Renegade Sportsman, in the Oregonian's May 30 issue. I see I neglected to provide a link to my previous Oregonian review, as well, of Brady Udall's surprisingly charming and funny novel The Lonely Polygamist on May 9.
On May 16 I participated in a staged reading of Neil Simon's "Last of the Red-Hot Lovers," in which I played the title role of Bernie Cashman. The Gresham Outlook had a nice advance story about the show, in which I was quoted several times, in the May 16 issue.
I have been cast in a TV pilot for a show called "The Obtainer" to be shot by Shake the Sky films later in August. It is an action-adventure story that I overheard a crew member describe as a combination of Indiana Jones and "Highlander." I am to play Dr. Ashiabi, an Arab archaeologist. Wendy Spurgeon, with whom I acted in "The Miracle Worker" last summer, is involved in the project behind the scenes.
June 2, 2010
Two short promotional films for projects I've worked on recently are now online. First is the preview for "Coup de Théâtre," which features brief glimpses of me throughout. The other is a promo for "The Magic Shiznit Show," a proposed Web series in which I did a brief turn as a homeless man. You get a glimpse of him at 00:58-1:02.
I have already been on three shoots for "Ingenium," a collaboration of writer-director Zach Persson and writer-stars Jesse and Casey Pitel. We had a rainy, muddy day out at the Con Global shipyard in North Portland on May 22, a nicer evening along the Columbia River east of Washougal, Washington on May 26, and a ballroom scene in downtown Vancouver on May 31. The photo at right shows me in my get-up as the evil Dr. Mortimer. Note the firearm; I've just killed someone here.
The May 22 performance of "Translations," Brian Friel's play about British soldier-engineers mapping Ireland in 1833 and changing all the local place names to British names, went splendidly. I ran into an elegant older woman from the audience during the break who said she had seen the original production which included Liam Neeson(!). A young British woman complimented me on my British dialect afterward.
May 7, 2010
Oh boy. Things are happening much faster than I can keep up with them here. Let's see . . . .
Coming up: the short student film in which I played an unsympathetic psychiatrist who is no help counseling a young man grieving his father's death, "Divergence," will screen at the Hollywood Theatre in Portland on May 17 at 6:30 p.m.
"Translations," the Brian Friel play about British soldier-engineers mapping Ireland in 1833 and changing all the local place names to British names, in which I play a lobsterback who falls in love with Ireland and an Irish girl, and is murdered by Irish nationalists for his pains, will be staged for one performance only, free, at Marylhurst College on May 22 at 2 p.m., as part of the fourth annual Irish Language Day festivities.
On Wednesday, May 5, I attended the first read of an independent film project called "Ingenium." I won't even try to summarize the science fiction plot. Suffice it to say that I will be playing twin brother scientists -- one good, one evil -- named Elliott and Mortimer White. Mortimer, the evil one, will be masked for most of the story. The film will shoot between late May and late July.
At "Story Time for Grownups" on Monday the 3rd, I read from Catch-22. One of the memorable things that happened in connection with that is that on Sunday afternoon I received an email with the subject header "A message from Yossarian's daughter." The body of the email read:
Hi David,
I'm a writer in NYC, Joe Heller was my father, and a good friend told me about your Portland "Catch-22" reading. Bravo, sir. I'm in the process of writing a book called "Yossarian Slept Here" for Simon & Schuster, with publication to coincide with the 50th anniversary of "Catch" in 2011.I know there are going to be some events planned then, even though it's too soon to know what, when or where, but I wonder if you might like to be involved perhaps in some way? Are you even in NY?
Keep up the good work.
All my best,
Erica Heller
The "Spoon River Anthology" project did another videotaping on May 2.
On April 26 I joined Entr'acte, a loose-knit group of singers and actors who read musical scores for fun. We did the score and libretto for "Promises, Promises," and I sang the role of Dr. Dreyfuss. Among my acquaintances in attendance were Michael Biesanz and Margie Boule.
My final shoots with "Coup de Théâtre" were on Friday, April 23. We were shooting the "movie premiere" scenes at the Moreland Theatre in the Sellwood neighborhood of Southeast Portland. Although my only line in the script was "Adrian? Let's talk," director Sean Parker had me improvise a speech to the audience at the premiere that must have amounted to five or six sentences. I hope that makes it into the final cut.
The "Coup" project is nearly all in the can. The filmmakers will spent most of the summer editing it, and hope to have it ready in September to submit to Sundance and other film festivals for next year. There will likely be a local screening for the cast, friends, and family in the fall.
On Thursday, April 22, I shot a few scenes of a small role in an independent feature called "Sister Mary's Angel." The story concerns twin sisters -- a lingerie model and a nun -- who switch places temporarily so the former can take advantage of the latter's medical insurance coverage. Part of the story (and the humor) comes from the efforts of a suspicious fellow nun who senses something's not right and goes on a detective hunt for the truth. I played one of a small group of barflies who hassle the snooping nun at a pub. I will be shooting another scene for this film on May 24.
I did a shoot with Thatsacall.com on April 9 in which I played a sales manager at a meeting that tries to run various trainings and invariably gets beaten, hit, and struck by Charles Charles or various inanimate objects. The acted violence went fine, but I hit myself in the head with a board and gave myself a bloody nose. I'll be doing another shoot with Thatsacall on May 10.
April 5, 2010
My first-ever acting demo reel was edited and uploaded on the Web -- on YouTube, of course -- on March 23, the week before my birthday.
It contains two sequences from "Coup de Théâtre" that were shot within the last two months, the sequence from "Syndication" in which I play a Chinese gangster gunned down at Hung Far Low restaurant, two scenes from the 48-Hour Film Festival entry in which I starred ("A Hole Story"), a couple sequences from the 3-D animation -- "The Journey" -- for which I did the voices, a clip from a KGW news segment on my long-running "Story Time for Grownups" at Grendel's Coffee House (see screen shot above), and a couple clips from stage shows ("Junie B. Jones and a Little Monkey Business" at NW Children's Theatre, and a brief stinger at the end from a Chekhov adaptation called "Three Years" -- below).
I already have video clips from other projects either in hand or on the way shortly, so I will undoubtedly update this reel before long.
I was cast in a production of "The King and I" to be staged in July by Broadway Rose Theatre Company in Tigard. I will be playing the Kralahome -- the King of Siam's conservative counselor who warns him against pernicious Western influences such as that governess person.
On March 24 I went to the studios of Portland Community Media, headquarters of the local cable access station, to participate in the launch of a project to read selections from Edgar Lee Masters' "Spoon River Anthology" on camera. The project is the brainchild of Daniel Webb. Reader/actors with whom I'd worked on other projects, like Tim Jaeger and Patti Harelkin, were also present. Joel Preston Smith, a professional photographer who has published a book of images from the Iraq, Night of a Thousand Stars, was on hand to shoot pictures of the process. The shot here is an example. I recorded the opening, introductory poem called "The Hill" ("All, all are sleeping on the hill") and look forward to doing others in early May.
Also on March 24 I shot video for a new Web series called "Majic Shiznit" (the stage name of a white rap artist -- or would-be one, rather) in which I appeared as a homeless man. My scene was shot in the underground garage beneath the Stadium Fred Meyer (where Carole and I used to shop for groceries all the time when we lived in Northwest Portland, in 1991-2005) between 11 p.m. and 1 a.m. This pilot episode of the proposed series will be ready to premiere in roughly a month.
I have continued to shoot scenes for "Coup de Théâtre" -- the independent film in which I play movie producer Rick Steiner. (You'll recognize the still at left and the one in the fedora below from my demo reel.) At this point all my scenes for the picture are "in the can" (so to speak; the video is being shot digitally), save for a final one neaer the end, when the movie-within-the-movie has its premiere. Most of the other characters, who have not appeared in scenes with mine before now, will show up for that. We will likely shoot the scene at the venerable Hollywood Theatre in east Portland (where I have both seen and performed in many shows, last May's "Plan 9 From Outer Space" show with Filmusik, for example) toward the end of this month.
Another new acting activity for me has been work with Thatsacall.com, a company that shoots humorous training and management videos for pharmaceutical companies. The founders, Brian Williams and Michael Farrell, were longtime pharmaceutical salesmen who created this company after a joke video they made for a regional sales meeting went over big. Brian now plays an obnoxious drug salesman named "Charles Charles" in the videos Farrell shoots and edits for in-house presentations at companies such as Genentech. I have joined a team of other actors who play mostly straight men -- bemused and nonplused sales managers and physicians -- to Brian's character.
March 4, 2010
I'm halfway through the two-weekend, six-performance run of "King Lear" at Mt. Hood Community College. Remaining shows are Friday and Saturday nights, March 5-6 at 7:30 p.m. and a final Sunday matinee, March 7 at 12 noon. You should see this just for Sam Mowry's titanic performance in the title role. Tickets may be ordered online here:
http://www.mhcc.edu/pages/2909.asp
The student paper at the college, The Advocate, had a nice story about the production, notable for its photographs, which may be seen here:
On January 22 I performed with Third Angle New Music Ensemble, an experimental chamber group composed of top classical instrumentalists (several of them members of the Oregon Symphony) that commissions and plays new works. I was guest artist for the world premiere of "Gulliver in Faremido," a piece by Oregon Symphony resident conductor Gregory Vajda. Mr. Vajda is Hungarian, and he adapted a short story about a further adventure of Gulliver when he travels to a planet populated by musical robots.
The piece is scored for piano, violin, cello, flute, clarinet and AKAI EWI USB electronic wind instrument (a woodwind synthesizer), and percussion (two sets of tubular bells and vibraphone). We performed it at Kaul Auditorium on the campus of Reed College, in a program that also featured Ursula K. LeGuin reading one of her children's fantasy stories to music.
Here is the announcement of the concert, on the Third Angle Web site. :
Oregon Music News published online an interview with the composer, librettist, and me.
I have continued to do video work. The "Coup de Théâtre" project (see Dec. 7 entry) is more than half completed, and I have shot three of roughly five scenes in which my character appears.
Last week I shot a scene in a short film by Spencer Hadduck, a senior Film student at Pacific University, called "Divergence." I play a not-very-sympathetic shrink who is no help with a young man grieving the death of his father.
I have had brief appearances in the independent film "Did You Kiss Anyone?" (in which I am a bar patron who may or may not try to hit on the heroine, played by Amanda Charr Englund, but is handily dismissed by her in any case; see screen shot from the clip below), the indie film " the Web series "Wage Slaves" (I am a coffee house habitué who is busily working on his laptop while the barista played by Leif Norby sweeps under my feet).
Of other projects mentioned below, "Syndication" and "Trapped" remain in post-production. "Lucky Jim's Fishing Show" will not be moving forward in May and is on indefinite hold, mostly due to venue issues. The finale of season 2 of "Leverage" aired on Feb. 17, and you can definitely recognize me in the background of several shots that take place in the cargo hold of the ship, late in the episode. The show (entitled "The Maltese Falcon Job") may be viewed online at TNT's Web site, here:
http://www.tnt.tv/series/leverage/
I have already auditioned for a speaking guest role in the third season, which began shooting in Portland this week.
If you haven't yet seen "A Hole Story," the charming short film I starred in last summer -- written, shot, edited, and scored in only 48 hours -- the director has put it online at his Web site. This is an 11-minute "director's cut," as opposed to the 7-minute version required by the 48-Hour Film Festival contest. Click on "Short Films" and you'll see the link on the right.
December 7, 2009
Today was a busy one. I was up at 6:30 a.m. to get to a video shoot at Grand Central Restaurant and Bowling Lounge on the east side. They were filming an infomercial to air on January 2 to publicize their atypical bowling alley fare: sushi, pizza, deep-fried prawns, huge burgers, and other delicacies. We actors bowled, munched, and partied (I drank a pomegranate martini, a whiskey sour, and a beer -- all before 10:30 a.m. on a Monday!) in the background while the chef, bartender, and owner chatted on camera about the place and its services.
Then I went over at the Doug Fir Lounge by 11 a.m. for shooting of some scenes for the independent film "The Corners," which stars my colleague Josh Sawtell, with whom I was in the Chorus of Classic Greek Theatre's production of "Antigone" just a little over a year ago. I was part of a crowd of extras at a rock club through which the principal characters chased one another and talked. The Doug Fir is one of the trendiest clubs in town for the past several years; it's diagonally across the intersection from the Galaxy where I've often gone for karaoke, and a block east of Grendel's Coffee House where I've hosted my "Story Time for Grownups" for much of the past five years, but I'd never been inside before today. You can see more about the film and a clip with Josh (he's the one in the shades) here. Josh is headed to L.A. after January 1 to pursue his professional acting career.
Finally in the evening I headed out to Hillsboro for rehearsal of "A Very Special Christmas Show" episode of "Lucky Jim's Fishing Show." (The Webmaster has been slow to update the Web site since our Halloween special, but all the information is there somewhere, as well as sound files of all our past shows.) The Christmast special will have two performances on Wednesday and Thursday, Dec. 16 and 17, at 7:00 p.m. in the Walters Cultural Arts Center. Tickets are only $7 at the door. Beer, wine, and treats will be on sale in the lobby.
A series of new episodes of "Lucky Jim's Fishing Show" will air on the first three Fridays in May 2010 (the 7th, 14th, and 21st), with a repeat performance of the audience's favorite episodes on May 28.
Two other projects coming up after the New Year. I will have a small but key role as a film producer, Rick Steiner, in an independent feature with the working title "Coup de Théâtre." The story concerns a young, naive, but ambitious kid who lands a job with a film production company that churns out dumb action thrillers. He schemes with the help of a couple key tech crew members in the production team to shoot a shadow project of high quality under the nose of the dictatorial film director. My character will quietly support the kid's efforts behind the scenes, even without the kid being aware of it.
Secondly, I'll be playing Albany, the weak but kind-hearted husband of Lear's oldest daughter Goneril, in a stage production of "King Lear" by Mt. Hood Repertory Theatre Company. Veteran Portland stage and voice actor Sam Mowry (whose Willamette Radio Workshop I've done lots of shows with over the past four years) has been cast as Lear, his son Atticus (with whom I've been in productions of Shakespeare and Euripides in the past) will be Cornwall, and several other fine actors known to me are in this production. The director is Rick Zimmer,; shows are Feb. 26, 27, and 28, and March 5, 6, and 7 -- 7:30 p.m. on Fridays and Saturdays, 2 p.m. on Sundays.
November 5, 2009
This Saturday, Nov. 7, I'll be appearing in a staged reading of two new short screenplays at the Loves Street Playhouse in Woodland, Washington. The scripts, winners of the theater's scriptwriting contest, are "The Dinner Party" by Daniel & Kathryn DiIullo, and "About Right" by Gregory E. Zschomler. In the first, I'll play James Hollingsworth, a septuagenarian millionaire who has his estranged adult children to dinner in order to make a momentous announcement. In the second, I'll play Rick Rake, PI, who investigates the murder of his silent partner in their office and the theft of a $600,000 painting from the art museum. And I'll chew on several toothpicks. Admission is $5, the show starts at 7:30 with dessert, coffee, and Q&A with the playwrights afterward.
This week my review of Cranioklepty: Grave Robbing and the Search for Genius by Colin Dickey went online at the California Literary Review. Libby Jordan, publicist for the Unbridled Books, the publisher, wrote me an email that said "Wow. David, your review of Cranioklepty was, in a word I rarely use ... awesome! And your attention to detail extraordinary." She also forwarded a comment from an editor at Unbridled: "I wish the world were full of reviewers who realized the work all our authors put into their books, took those books seriously, placed them in context, used them as springboards . . . . made them part of a larger conversation."
My review of Wolf Hall, this year's winner of the Man Booker Prize for the best English-language fiction of the year by a citizen of the British commenwealth, appeared in the Oregonian on Sunday, October 25.
Next Wednesday, Nov. 11, I'll be participating in a reading of new plays by writers in Francesca Sanders's playwriting class, at Theatre! Theater!, 3430 S.E. Belmont in Portland, at 7:30 p.m.
I have been cast in a short film called "Trapped," a psychological thriller written by Stephanie Henderson, who will direct. I play Dr. Ezra Hayes, a psychiatrist who tries to help 20-something Raven overcome a severe childhood trauma. Shooting will take place in mid-November. Henderson hopes to enter her movie in the Seattle International Film Festival next May.
October 16, 2009
He's BACK! Lucky Jim returns for Lucky Jim's Halloween Special this Wednesday and Thursday, Oct. 21-22 at 7 p.m. at the Hillsboro Cultural Arts Centre. Jim and Neato get tricked into spending a night in (or at least in the dark woods near to) a haunted house -- with Schwantz and McKeith for company. WORM studios are under messy renovation, Jim has a swollen left eye, and Frohock gets turned into a zombie! (If some of these names are unfamiliar, you can listen to digital audio recordings of last spring's episodes on the Lithium Theatre Web site, and remind yourself or get all caught up.)
Tickets are $7, and a caterer will also have treats, wine, and beer on hand, which we're hoping will put the audience in even more of a mood to laugh.
Willamette Radio Workshop is gearing up to do its annual Halloween show at McMenamins Kennedy School, but this year's shows will be a little different from years past. Instead of an adaptation of an old story (e.g., Frankenstein, The Island of Dr. Moreau, Jekyl and Hyde, The Monkey's Paw), WRW will do a series of all-new, original scripts collectively known as "Tales From the St. James Infirmary."
An array of writers (some veterans of WRW, some unknown to us until now), have written new audio stories inspired by the old New Orleans jazz funeral march, "St. James Infirmary." The variety -- and surprisingly, the laughs as well as the chills -- is vast. Willamette Radio Workshop will perform two entirely different shows, one at 4:00 p.m. and one at 6:00 p.m. on Saturday, October 31, with a cast of 25 actors, a live 7-piece band, and the usual array of live and electronic sound effects. Admission, as always, is free.
Last Sunday I worked on an independent film called "Syndication," a project of Michael Odegard and Working Poor Studios. We were shooting at the famed Portland Chinese restaurant, Hung Far Low, which stood for many decades at the corner of SW Fourth and Couch (where I did some film extra work for "Leverage" two months ago) in Chinatown, but moved recently to SE 82nd and Division.
I played Chao Chao, a Chinese gangster who approaches a waitress in the kitchen for his usual oral servicing when shots ring out, he is hit in the back, and he scrambles out a door, down a hall, and collapses on the bar's dance floor under a hail of bullets. We filmed between 11 p.m. and 1 a.m. I was reunited with "Harvey" (he's the illegal arms buyer in the stocking cap and shades from the Aug. 31 "Leverage" shoot, in the photo below) and made the delightful acquaintance of Lacey Nicole Koidahl of Centralia, Washington, who played the hapless waitress that gets splattered with Chao Chao's blood.
September 25, 2009
The past month has been one of the most eventful in my life. Going backwards from the present:
From September 5th through the 19th, Carole and I were on a dream vacation packaged by Elderhostel (which has just renamed itself "Exploritas") involving a transatlantic cruise aboard the Queen Mary 2, then five days in London with theater plays, museum tours, and the like. Most of the photos and commentary have gone and will continue to go into our Facebook pages and a travel blog that Carole set up.
The 48-Hour Film Project movie I starred in, "A Hole Story" by Daniel Elkayam and Overcast Productions, won the Portland festival award for Best Writing (the second year in a row that Dan's won that one). The choppy, shortened version in the competition was 7 minutes, but Dan did a "director's cut" that is closer to ten and a half. It is available on his Facebook page, and eventually will be viewable on YouTube -- probably after he has submitted it to other film festivals.
On August 30 and 31, I spent 11 and 12 hours, respectively, on the set of the TNT cable series "Leverage" -- which in this case was an oil pumper ship docked in North Portland and cheekily renamed "Il Falcone Maltese" for the second season finale of the show. Guest villain was played by Paul Blackthorne. I was one of eight obviously ethnic folks who were playing illegal arms buyers. (That's most of us below.)
I was shot in three or four scenes that could end up in the episode: walking past the camera along the deck of the ship; heading down a steep ladder stair from an upper deck; examining semiautomatic weapons and grenades, and discussing rates with the others down in the cargo hold, while Timothy Hutton and Blackthorne speak to each other in the foreground (the longest take, but I'm likely to be indistinct in the background); and walking past the camera in the cargo hold before it focuses on co-star Christian Kane ("Eliot," the muscle man and martial artist) slipping through a doorway (a very brief shot, but like the first one on deck, I'm in close and more apt to be recognizable).
Just days before, on August 27, it was announced that "Leverage" had been renewed for a fifteen-episode third season with TNT, so assuming that it films again in Portland (which seems likely, given the buzz that Hutton and the rest enjoyed working up here; read: away from L.A.) my next goal will be to land a walk-on speaking role, as did many of my Portland actor friends this past year.
August 27 was a red-letter day for me for a much bigger reason, however: that afternoon, I signed with Ryan Artists to represent me as my talent agents. The hope is that they will help me to get that spot on "Leverage" as well as potential modeling and voice acting work.
I have continued to audition for small independent films. On Monday, Sept. 21, I did a little work as an extra for a project called "Nature" in a diner (Diane's Restaurant at 5250 SE Foster Road). The scene involved a waitress with a strong Russian accent who is mistaken for a German and insulted by an old Jewish couple who get up and abandon their meal after a confrontation with her. I was a business diner at a nearby table.
I created new pages for "The Miracle Worker" and "Leverage."
August 18, 2009
This past weekend I joined a team that competed in the annual 48-Hour Film Project, in which filmmakers are given a genre, a character (name and occupation), a prop, and a line of dialogue, and have 48 hours to write a script, then shoot and edit it into a finished 7-minute film that includes all four elements. Teams in a given city have to work with the same latter three items but get assigned different genres. If there are a lot of teams competing (and there in Portland: 54 this year), several teams will get the same genre.
I kind of lucked out because my team was headed by Daniel Elkayam, a talented writer-director who won the award for Best Writing in Portland's 2008 competition. You can see the film he made with his crew last year, "Take the Body and Run," which was best in its genre of Road Movie, on the 48-Hour Film Project Web site.
Daniel cast me as his lead, Brian Merryweather, a lab tech who digs a hole to China (our assigned genre was "fantasy"). For me, this involved 4 hours of brainstorming with the team on Friday night; 15 hours of shooting on Saturday (from 10:30 a.m. to 1:30 a.m.); and another 9 hours of shooting on Sunday. Since I immediately went into 12 hours of work as a film extra for "Leverage" the following morning (see below), I'm only just beginning to get caught up on sleep and regain my equilibrium.
The completed film, "The Hole Story," will be screened with other entries at 7:00 p.m. this Thursday, August 20, at the Hollywood Theatre, 4122 NE Sandy Boulevard (the same place where I performed the live "Plan 9 From Outer Space" three months ago). Tickets are $8. I would be very surprised if our film is not among the finalists, which will be screened again on August 31 at 7:30.
On Monday (yesterday), I got to work as an extra on the set of "Leverage," the TNT cable series that stars Timothy Hutton as a former insurance investigator who heads a team of thieves and hackers he used to hunt down, in order to avenge people who have been screwed by corporations and the System. It's kind of a modern Robin-Hood situation, though I've heard other people compare it to "Ocean's Eleven" and "The A-Team," neither of which I've seen.
I have not seen any of this, the second season, which has included many of my Portland actor friends in small speaking roles, because we don't get TNT on our service and the network's Web site is not Mac-friendly. But Carole and I watched the first season on DVD, and the regular characters and writing are delightful.
I got to be an extra in an episode called "The Future Job," which guest stars Luke Perry as a con man psychic and Jeri Ryan as a gypsy fortune teller. If I don't end up on the cutting room floor, I may be visible as a business-suited man on the far streetcorner talking on his cell phone as a black Honda Genesis driven by Hutton roars through the intersection after almost running over the Luke Perry character. There is also a scene in the courtyard of a cafe where Hutton and then Perry chat with Ryan, and I'm in a lavender shirt at the table behind them, with my back to the camera.
Perhaps most significant, if the least exciting for the moment, I talked with one of the three talent agencies here in Portland this afternoon about whether they might represent me. Should have an answer from them within a few days.
I've auditioned for four other independent films in the past ten days. Was provisionally cast as a detective named Chandler (yeah, I know, but he's the third of a team of FBI operatives) in a film project about the "FBI's Doomsday Cult Division." We will try to schedule a day to film before the end of August.
August 9, 2009
It has been a busy week! An adventure involving a "guerilla garden" created opportunities for a lot of writing. My first report appeared on the Oregonian's online op-ed page known as "The Stump" on Thursday, July 30. A dozen reader's comments, mostly positive, were posted at the bottom of that piece.
Next, the editor of the Oregonian's print version asked me for a 500-word summary of the saga for the op-ed page. That was printed Wednesday (August 5), and again garnered lots of positive reader comments.
Finally, the owners of a blog about food and gardening based in San Francisco area emailed me to request a detailed version of the whole story, which they put online on Friday (August 7).
My review of Elizabeth Hawes's Camus: A Romance is dated Friday but appears in today's print edition of the Oregonian.
I also did a pre-read audition for the TNT cable series "Leverage" and auditioned for two independent films. Nothing solid on that front yet. This coming week I will talk to two prospective talent agencies.
July 28, 2009
The Books section of the Web site has been filled in with excerpts from my earlier books, Boston College High School 1863-1983, and The Unofficial Book of Harvard Trivia. I also created pages with reviews of and/or endorsements for the B.C. High and Harvard books.
July 22, 2009
The Oregonian's review of my current show, "The Miracle Worker" at Mt Hood Repertory Theatre, appeared July 13, 2009.
I placed an announcement of my next "Story Time for Grownups" reading, which will be a selection of stories by Ray Bradbury on August 3 at 7:30, on the Readings page.
My review of Paul Collins's The Book of William: How Shakespeare's First Folio Conquered the World appeared in the Oregonian on July 2, 2009. An interview with Collins will appear shortly in (with an Internet Web 'zine, it feels almost more proper to say "on") the California Literary Review.
I have just about finished writing biographical entries about Alberto Salazar and Russell Sadler for the Oregon Encyclopedia, and will turn them in later this week.
June 29, 2009
My review of a "musical docu-tragi-comedy" called "Courting Condi" has been posted on the DocumentaryFilms.net Web site.
My review of the book Vanished Smile: the mysterious theft of Mona Lisa, by R.A. Scotti, has been posted online at the California Literary Review.
Tech week for "The Miracle Worker" at Mt. Hood Repertory Theatre begins on Monday, with opening night set for next Friday, June 10. The run will be Friday and Saturday nights at 8:00, Sundays at 2:00, through August 2. I will be playing Dr. Anagnos, Annie Sullivan's mentor at the Perkins School for the Blind in Boston, who sends her off to her first job trying to teach 6-year-old Helen Keller.
On Saturday I joined other voice actors at the home of Sam Mowry and Cindy McGean to read aloud a stack of original scripts submitted for Willamette Radio Workshop's upcoming Halloween show at McMenamin's Kennedy School. The theme is "St. James Infirmary Blues." There were some terrific pieces in this bunch: plenty of creepy and macabre, but a surprising amount of laughs, too. The plan is to record most of these scripts in advance, in order to offer them to public radio stations for their Halloween programming, and perform the best of them live at the Kennedy School in two shows on Halloween, which is a Saturday this year. Of course I'm hoping to be in the thick of things on this project.
"Lucky Jim's Fishing Show" had its final show of the season June 18. As well as being performed live at the Hillsboro Cultural Arts Center and broadcast live on KOHI AM-1600 Talk Radio in St. Helens, all four performance nights were recorded digitally and are available for listening on the Lithium Theatre Web site Audio page. The show went over well enough that a Halloween special, Christmas special, and another arc of 14 to 16 shows next spring are under discussion. No telling where I'll fit into all this, because Jim was shot by a mysterious sniper and hospitalized just before a tornado hit town.
May 27, 2009
A project that came together rather swiftly was Willamette Radio Workshop's guest appearance in a special screening of Ed Wood's "Plan 9 From Outer Space," often acknowledged as "the worst movie ever made." Under the aegis of a creative outfit known as Filmusik, we performed the original dialogue live as an adjunct to an entirely new film score played by the Classical Revolution PDX String Quartet and electronica artist Sugar Shortwave.
The show got excellent coverage: not only a featured event in the alternative weekly The Portland Mercury, but a story on the Channel 2 KATU blog, and another feature story by John Foyston on the Oregonian's blog. We're doing a second show Friday night, May 29.
"Lucky Jim's Fishing Show" (see details below) rolls on. We had our second show -- of an additional four episodes -- on Thursday, May 21, and an MP3 copy of that one joined the other on the Lucky Jim audio page. Sound engineer and techie extraordinaire Alex Rowe also did a little video promo for our show, which you can find here as well as on YouTube, I gather. Two more performances to go: on June 4 and 18.
May 11, 2009
"Lucky Jim's Fishing Show" (see details below) had a terrific opening night. Roughly a hundred audience members laughed and applauded our first four episodes, which were not only broadcast live on KOHI AM-1600 Talk Radio in St. Helens, but digitally recorded and place online the following day. You can listen to an MP3 copy by going here.
The Hillsboro Argus did a feature story about the Lucky Jim project that ran on Tuesday, May 5. The complete text of the story and some photos are here.
May 5, 2009
"Lucky Jim's Fishing Show" (see details below) debuts two nights from now. If you'd like to see a radio sitcom performed live before and audience while it's being broadcast on the air, come to the Hillsboro Cultural Arts Center at 527 East Main Street in Hillsboro for the 7:00 p.m. show Thursday. Suggested donation is $5.
The links to three of my more recent Oregonian book reviews had disappeared, so I created new pages for my pieces on The Lazarus Project by Alexsandar Hemon, Telex from Cuba by Rachel Kushner, and Hot, Flat, and Crowded by Thomas L. Friedman.
April 19, 2009
The Lithium Theatre Company, the producer of "Lucky Jim's Fishing Show," the live-radio sitcom in which I will star, now has its own Web site. There are also at least two other announcements of the first performance on the Internet, at the City of Hillsboro's page for the Walters Cultural Arts Center, where the live performances will take place, and on LinkedIn.
On my Theater productions page, I provided links to the graphic novel in which I appeared as a character back in the fall of 2006, "The Year of the Dog."
March 28, 2009
Happy Birthday to me! It's been a pleasant but quiet anniversary, with a late, leisurely breakfast, an early movie ("Duplicity," a charming caper flick with Clive Owen and Julia Roberts), and a sushi dinner at Todai. A happy surprise was a chance encounter with my first love, Jane Cynthia (Stensland) Conlan, whom I had not seen in several years, in Pioneer Place. The big party is scheduled for tomorrow.
On the professional front, my next acting project starts rehearsals on Wednesday, April. 1. It's an old-fashioned live-radio sitcom called "Lucky Jim's Fishing Show," which is also the name of the program that is depicted in the story. Jim Harbaugh is a big fish in a very small pond -- a local celebrity in a small Wisconsin town who just lost his TV show and is reviving it on a radio station. His sidekick Neato Johnson is a maybe-Native American, the station owner Dick Schwantz is a pompous ass, and young producer Jennifer tries to hold it all together. Additional complications involve Jim's wife Connie, who wants to pursue a career of her own in massage therapy. (I'm playing Lucky Jim, by the way.)
We will perform the show before a live audience at the Hillsboro Cultural Arts Center, 527 East Main Street in Hillsboro (the same place I appeared in a performance of "Antigone" last fall), while broadcasting live on KOHI-AM out of St. Helens and taping for rebroadcast and podcast. Three episodes will be performed on four nights, every other Thursday, on May 7 and 21, and June 7 and 14. More details to come.
I created a page of photos and comments about the recent production of "Private Lives."
