There are 4 days left in the Kickstarter campaign for the project I’ve been working on for the past year and a half, and we’ve raised about 70% of our goal. Please consider helping out with a donation of any size or by passing this on. Or both.

And we’d love to see you at the play: October 27-30 at Camp Ketcha in Portland, ME. Check the Of Farms and Fables blog or the Open Waters website for more info. I’m proud of the script, proud of the cast (half farm workers, half professional actors!), proud of the whole team – I think it’ll be quite the show.

Fact #8: Lighting designers are unusual (and seen as an “American thing”).

Generally, the director takes care of the lights with the help of a full-time employee of the theater who’s kind of a mix between a master electrician and a light board op and who knows the lights of the house inside and out. Before full tech rehearsals happen, they talk through the show – the director says what feeling she wants where, or gets more specific, depending on director and show. And that’s that. We can move on to tech.

1. I’ve been traveling (first visit to London and a quick stop in Hamburg). Though I have seen plenty of theater (London: Kafka’s Monkey – Young Vic, Much Ado and Doctor Faustus – Shakespeare’s Globe, Richard III – Old Vic; Hamburg: the improv group Schiller Killer, and Peer Gynt – Thalia Theater), travel is often a bit too overwhelming for coherent thoughts. Actually, that’s something I should get over.
2. I’m leaving Berlin on July 12. Ladies and gentlemen, that is 11 days from now. And it’s put me in a very strange state of mind. Mind you, I’m going back in order to work on and see some very exciting things and people, and I am going to be back in Berlin again in November. But four months is a long time to spend away from a city that really feels like home.

With those thoughts of leaving and coming back, and my ongoing struggle with the question, “Is it feasible/desirable for me to make Berlin my home? And for how long?” – the modern art exhibit based in Berlin, showing from June 8 – July 24 in Atelierhaus Monbijou and other places, came in on a hauntingly appropriate note. Yesterday I wandered through the Monbijou studios. Typical Berlin gallery: old and unclean, whitewashed walls bare and bumpy save for art, in some rooms mold or piss assaulting the nasal palate. A scrappy, unadorned collection from artists with one thing in common: Berlin is their artistic home.

Visual artists have one less barrier to working internationally than theatermakers: language. At the least, that barrier is more easily crossed or circumvented. Still, it was comforting to me to see the work of my nomadic brethren from the world over who are living and creating with a good degree of success in this city.

Unsurprisingly, I’m most drawn to artwork that has an element of the performative. So Trevor Lloyd’s Mom sticks in my mind: Lloyd’s nomadism brought him to Berlin without a picture of his mother, and instead of asking her to send one, he drew her, over and over, from memory – left-handed, with closed eyes, and while standing on his head. He writes something about feeling that this is the way he can best access his subconscious, but to me this performative act recorded in the drawings that are on display is more interesting seen as a metaphor for memory: topsy-turvy, bizarre, associative, uncontrollable.

And my friends over at Yinzerspielen will find Matthias Fritsch’s multimedia crowdsourced piece We, Technoviking interesting: it’s built by the artist from the multitude of viewer re-creations of Fritsch’s original video Kneecam No. 1/Technoviking, taken in Berlin during the Fuckparade in 2000.

But my favorite moment was climbing to the top of the rickety metal platform outside of the studios. Flight after flight in a light rain, gray day, not knowing what I’d find. Turns out: a plain surface housing three SUV’s, like a personal and inescapable parking garage. A strange trio of ready-mades, unremarkable except for the fact that they’re there – how did they get there? And what are they doing at all in this flat, cobblestoned, urban landscape, these hardy gas-guzzlers made for leaping up mountains and plowing through streams? But they’re there nonetheless, unfazed, looking calm and blank-eyed over a city where they shouldn’t belong.

Fact #7: The house opens about five minutes before the show starts.

Forget a half hour before curtain – in a German theater, you might not actually be sitting down until after the show’s scheduled start time. This has its benefits. Rather than spend your pre-show waiting time sitting in your seat flipping through your program (which you’d have had to buy, anyway) to avoid the awkwardness of trying to make conversation with your date, this forces you to spend it in the pleasant and friendly theater bar, rubbing shoulders with the rest of the audience and (if you’re at one of the smaller theaters) the artistic staff, and sipping a beer or a Bionade – which you can then bring into the theater with you, when it finally does open. Also smart business for the theater, especially because the show probably has no intermission.

Fact #6: The creation of a life-sized set model is often a part of the rehearsal process.

The Bauprobe (building rehearsal), as it was explained to me by the scenic designer for Parasiten, is a rehearsal early on in the process where the scenic designer builds a life-sized model of the set onstage, just so s/he and the director can make sure it’s going to work.

Second of all, I’M IN LONDON so I’m still not going to manage a real post (Saturday morning markets call!).

But my life’s been full of theater the past couple of weeks, so I thought I’d share the highlights.

• Compagnie Baninga/DeLaVallet Bidiefono: “Empreintes/On posera les mots après” – A dance piece from the Congo as part of the Border Border Express dance festival at HAU (5-word review: whose body does that? BADASS)
• René Pollesch: Schmeiß dein Ego weg! – I’ve seen woefully little Pollesch despite the abundance of his work that happens at the Volksbühne here, so I was thrilled I finally got to catch this one (5-word review: unanimous speech can be impressive)
• Stephen Belber/Stefan Pucher: Tape – So like, Pucher is a hot director and all. Theater heute named him director of the year in 2005. Then…why did we feel like we were sitting in a student lab theater production at fill-in-the-blank American university instead of at the Deutsches Theater? Doesn’t help that American playwright Belber’s play is doggedly unremarkable. Another strikeout for Americans in Germany… (5-word review: we sure this isn’t Labute?)
• Writing for Of Farms and Fables – I’ve been holed up in my Neukölln apartment working on the second draft of the farming play. Some days I literally did not leave, relying on our balcony or a little lean out of my window for fresh air; and I sent in Draft 2 about 2 hours before heading out to the airport – maybe my days of writing for 24-hour theater have become fundamentally ingrained in the way I write…
• Yinzerspielen: Our Whatifesto at the TCG National Conference on June 17! – This was way cool. Christina and Patrick presented our Whatifesto yesterday at the conference in LA, sandwiched between tons of awesome presenters; they did an incredible job, and they are still there, snuggling with lots of cool theater people for the last day of the conference. I got to watch their presentation via live stream and you can still see it here, starting at 1:10:14 (it’s 5 minutes long): http://livestre.am/PgM8
• The Young Vic: Kafka’s Monkey - So fun to finally get to go to a show at this London theater that I’m always hearing about, a one-person show with Complicite founding member Kathryn Hunter (5-word review: funny, scary, weird – go, apewoman)

Fact #5: You rarely get a free playbill.

But you can buy them at the theater for a couple of Euros. Called a Programmheft, they tend to have articles to supplement the play, some very nice picture spreads, and even, sometimes, the text of the play itself. They can provide a window into the director’s vision for the production, and if nothing else, are a nice keepsake.

Fact #4: State-funded theaters work primarily with the actors within their ensemble.

And if you’re an actor in an ensemble, you’re a full-time employee for the length of your contract. You’re probably rehearsing for an upcoming premiere during the day and performing one of the shows in the repertory at night, meaning you’re keeping an awful lot of lines in your head. But the season’s being planned with you in mind, as dramaturgs and directors consider how they can best show off the ensemble’s strengths.