Linda Eisenstein: Plays, Music, & More

Thursday, July 06, 2006



LIVE GIRLS! - TV SPOT

I got an email from Meghan Arnette, AD of Live Girls! Theater in Seattle, which is running my one act PIG PATTER. There's a cool streaming video about their Quickies series from "City A Go Go", a monthly arts video feature that is a project of the Seattle Channel.

One of the things I like most about the interview it is the way they identify all the artists who work with this small company: "actor/handyman", "actor/furniture mover", "associate artistic director/concession specialist", "artistic director/plumber". That's totally the reality of feisty small theater companies. You do all these day jobs to fund your art, then in your "spare time" you also do everything that needs to be done for your theater, including mopping the john. It's a life of 80 hour weeks, or more, keeping the place afloat, totally a labor of love.

It reminds me of the carnivalesque piece I created with our experimental ensemble when Cleveland Public Theatre was trying to buy the building we'd renovated for years: The Chapel of Perpetual Desire Presents a Liturgical Circus of Religious Fervor and Live Sex on Stage! It included a blues number I wrote and sung called "I Hate My Day Job". During the guitar solo, I read from a list of all the day jobs by the people who created the piece: "Jim (the A.D.) works in the so-called criminal justice system", "Amanda (the director) sells advertising over the phone". I ended it with "and Linda -- takes money -- from her parents!" It always got a huge laugh.

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