How did you ever get there from here?

“I’m just upstairs,” I shouted into the cell phone. “I just flew into SFO and I’m having trouble finding a parking space. I’ll be right down, I promise.” Flustered, sweating, running on two hours sleep, I burst into the rehearsal studio. All eyes turned to me. The actors smiled thinly. I silently plugged in all my gear. Rehearsal started.

And it was in this fractured mental state that I played He Is A Song.

I cried.

Mark this song well. You can say you knew it years before it went Top 40.

Our director writes:

“Imagine being able to watch the creation of COMPANY or THE ACT while those pieces were being workshopped and put together and then have the bragging rights to say ‘I was there when…’

If you can get yourself to the New Conservatory Theatre Center (NCTC) at 25 Van Ness in San Francisco between May 21 and June 26, 2004, you just may garner those boasting privileges regarding the next major work by Tony award winning writer George Furth as his new musical revue, THE END, begins its workshop process.

Furth is doing what he does best in THE END: writing about relationships with wit and razor-sharp insight. However, this time he is not penning a new book for a musical or scripting a play: he’s telling the story completely in lyrics.

Furth’s composing collaborator is arranger-composer Doug Katsaros. Helming and shaping the new treatment of this work is San Francisco director-choreographer Mike Ward.

The NCTC workshop of THE END is being billed as a ‘Pre-U.S. Tour’ tune-up for the tuner. Being housed in the intimate NCTC Theatre 3, tickets for this event in the 65-seat venue will most assuredly go fast. Tickets may be purchased online or by phoning the NCTC box office at 415.861.8972. For information, you can e-mail the box office at [email protected].

As an adjunct bonus and special treat for any theatre fan who wants to say ‘I was there when…’ each viewing of THE END will almost assuredly guarantee a different show: in addition to rotating in new material and different orders of songs during the limited engagement, five different actresses will be rotating amongst the three roles in the new book-less revue which loosely follows the stories of the beginning — but mostly the end — of the relationships of these three very different women.

THE END is produced by HLS Productions in association with New Conservatory.”

She’ll go and get her a skirt, stick it under her shirt

The office was a subliminal soft purple. The fluorescent lights flickered and buzzed overhead. Each of the cops was about fifty pounds overweight. Mine was a large white guy with a military buzz cut and thick stubby fingers. The cop punched buttons on a large computer, circa 1985, as he talked on the phone. While he was talking he slid a form across the desk to me.

I filled out the police form, listing the following items: one Fujitsu laptop, three pairs of dress pants, a Kodak digital camera, a GPS unit, four shirts, a fuzzy blue bathrobe, a shaving kit, and four protein cookies.

The cop continued to talk on the phone. “Yeah. Yeah. So they took what? Your computer? Did you lock your car? So how’d they get in? Yeah? Okay, well, you can come on down to the station and fill out a form.” He hung up.

“Wow, I guess this happens a lot here in South Central,” I told him.

“Yeah. Crackheads. They break in at the convention center, steal whatever’s in the car, and sell it.”

“Do you guys ever find the stuff again?” I asked.

“No,” he said. I gave him the form and he stamped it.

All the same. I’d appreciate it if you’d keep an eye out for my shaving kit. It’s black, about four inches by eight, and it has the initials JB on it.

But they do wear fleece to protect them from the beast

We scurried beneath the legs of the Eiffel Tower toward the Bateaux Parisiens. The sanitary woman behind the counter made a few decidedly French comments about our blue jeans and their dress code, so we offered to buy the most expensive seats on the boat. Eventually they took our euros and let us on. In every culture, money is always the ultimate arbiter of what we may and may not do.

As the glass-walled boat slid down the Seine, we ate smoked salmon, pate fois gras, steak with red wine sauce, four cheeses, and warm chocolate cake with mousse. Paris!

White wine, red wine, mimosas, Jack Daniels, Cointreau. Two hours into this three-hour tour, everybody on the boat was pretty well anaesthetized. Normally staid Japanese tourists were clapping in rhythm to the Russian violin. Then the keyboardist hit a switch, a canned rock drum kicked in, and I’ll be baised if they didn’t play “It’s Raining Men.”

Mr. Fantastic, you were right. Everywhere is like everywhere else.

My four walls follow me through my past

The girl, no more than seven, grins idly and bites her fingernail. She turns toward the windows, each one two stories high, and gazes out at the garden below: a rich geometric pattern of marble statues, tulips, and lilacs. She realizes, subliminally, that she should be holding the hand of her friend. But her partner’s hand has already found hers, and they whisper a few low syllables to one another about the reflecting pools below.

“Julie!” says the teacher, sternly. The teacher puts her hand on the girl’s head and turns it, as if opening a large jar of peanut butter.

She says, in French: “So if you are talking, I suppose you already know everything I am saying, so can you can tell me about this picture?”

The girl gazes up past Marie Antoinette’s jewel boxes, under the grand and awful trompe l’oeil, to the dark figure of Louis XIV glowering down on us. I have been dead for hundreds of years, little girl, thought the painting of Louis XIV. And I do not appreciate your inattention.

The teacher sniffed, “No, I didn’t think so,” and the girl sighed.

We left the school tour in the palace and spent the afternoon walking through the fairyland gardens of Versailles. The bruised, blotchy clouds threatened us through our walk through the Hameau de la Reine, Marie Antoinette’s life-size doll house. But they only exploded into rain after we had boarded the RER into Paris.

You think you’re mad, too unstable, kicking in chairs and knocking down tables

Hyde Park, five minutes from the Underground, Saturday afternoon. The swans nip and chase one another on the reflecting pool. The shirtless guys underhand rugby balls at one another, grinning, leaning, swaggering. The downtown girls have traded their rain slickers for bikini tops. They ensconce themselves on tablecloths and beach towels, their skin so white in the warm sun as to almost appear blue.

London has on her freshest face for me today. Airplane to hotel to downtown in three hours flat. I blink, dazzled by the high-noon sun. My body thinks it’s four a.m.

Only shooting stars break the mold

Dear Keith,

Read your script and all I can say is, wow! Wow! I say Wow repeatedly, in that thrilling low voice that I reserve for unusually exuberant situations!

I was so overcome with raw emotion that I could do only one thing, which is to read the script again. After careful consideration, then, I can surely say, without fear of contradiction: Wow!

I catch my breath, fan myself briefly with the printout to recover some equilibrium, and dedicate myself to a more academic analysis of your oeuvre.

Wow! Sorry, that just slipped out, there. I will refocus.

Now, regarding the elements of your script. It is well-typed, with very bold spacing choices. And your command of spelling is immaculate. I note with pleasure that you have elected to spell the word “bologna” with the requisite g. The secondary spelling, “baloney,” is frowned upon in modern literary circles.

Now, regarding your characters. Your protagonist is Bruce, a brilliant actor, misunderstood, underappreciated for the artistic genius that he is. Immediately the character leaps off the page to me. He talks exactly to my own personal situation in life. Here is an actor, struggling against the appalling difficulties of black-box theatre, ultimately to be truly admired and respected for the talent he is. A classic story!

However, one concern. Bruce, unfortunately enough, is a name that lesser writers have chosen as a cliche to represent homosexual characters. Do you think, perhaps, that people might mistakenly think that Bruce is homosexual due to his name? I wonder if the fact that he comes on stage wearing a dress and wig might wrongly suggest this idea? I see Bruce as a manly character, one generically dashing and charming after he effects his transformation. Perhaps we can provide him with a more masculine name, in order to avoid this line of analysis altogether. I leave the correct choice of name to you, the creator. Suggestions? I don’t know, perhaps Spike? Horatio? Doctor Z?

Here I must thank you for the extremely kind dedication that you wrote at the beginning of the play. I wonder, though. Do you think that the general audience will get the “Dedicated to the Great and Incomparable John Byrd” business at the beginning? If it’s not spoken in the actual play, how will the theatregoers understand and appreciate it? I can try to incorporate it into my interpretation of Bruce, but it would be challenging. Will it be printed in the program? Or perhaps there could be a small sign on an easel, to the right of the proscenium, with the inscription “Dedicated to the Great and Incomparable John Byrd.”

Now that I consider the matter, I think the small-sign idea might be most appropriate. A small sign does not take up valuable space in the program, where the other actors will surely want to list their biographies. We can post a small spotlight on the sign as well, so that it does not become a tripping hazard during blackouts and during intermision.

Now, the next character, Laura. I love the bit with the kiss between Laura and Bruce at the end. “You are so fucking beautiful” and a big smoocheroo. I am all about smoocheroos in the theater, especially when they involve me. But I think the moment would have to be authentic to play. Do you think we could get a blonde to play the part? I know a few blondes who currently refuse to have anything to do with me. With such a powerful role as Laura to offer, I could possibly get an exception from the court order and maybe make a phone call or two.

Actually a brunette would do as well, I suppose. The color of the hair, it’s one of those mutable actress qualities, one of those female properties that change with the latest fashions, with the checkout-stand magazine covers. We mustn’t put too much stock in it.

Perhaps a little experimentation with wigs and a number of actresses would be in order.

There are definitely a number of other parts in the play, which I can’t remember very clearly. It would be useful to have a list of characters at the beginning, so that I can keep them all straight. I am quite confident that we should be able to find other actors to play these parts. Most of them are quite easy, I think: no more than a few lines to memorize. There are plenty of actors in the greater Bay Area who excel at memorizing lines, and I think that many of them would appreciate the chance to play a part without the line-memorization burden of Hamlet or Macbeth.

Given a script of this caliber, I’m sure that we should have no problem finding a theater to produce it. We all know that TheatreWorks has a “new works” program intended to support the production of recent scripts, but we all also know that “new works” is basically a euphemism for “crap.” Might I convince you to tell a small white lie regarding the production of this script? Namely, that you wrote it about forty years ago? That way, it can’t be truly classified as a “new work” and thus it stands a better choice of production. The existence of an interesting backstory always assists in the production of a script. Perhaps I’m the first actor in forty years you’ve met who can manage the demands of the role?

There may be some confusion as to why you dedicated the script to John Byrd before he was born. We’ll deal with that as it comes.

Ah well. I suppose the Hillbarn will pick it up in any case.

A note regarding the costuming. I can supply the wig, beard and dress that my character requires. Perhaps I should bring my complete collection of women’s clothing to some rehearsal, so that we can determine the costume elements that best support the character.

Thanks so much for writing the script. It’s got potential. I can smell the potential. And I bet you can, too. We’re going places, you and me, kiddo. Just you wait.