TECH REHEARSAL - INGENUITY

Just got back from our tech rehearsal for TECH-YES! TECH-NO!, the series of pieces the Dark Room writers created for the Ingenuity Festival this weekend. It'll be performed in the back end of the old May Company building, with an entrance on Prospect Avenue just off Ontario, around the corner from Fat Fish Blue. The show performs once, on Friday July 14 at 2 pm. Don't miss it.

The old building is a wreck inside -- kind of like bombed-out Dresden. Those of us who have been in Cleveland long enough to remember shopping there (yes, Virginia, there WERE local department stores downtown once) were shocked to see how deteriorated things had become. But the Ingenuity folks have set up a very cool stage area inside.

I will be performing THE CELL PHONE SING-ALONG, a comic song that I wrote for the occasion, accompanying myself on (ahem) the accordion. I wrote it for the squeeze-box because (a) the accordion is funny; (b) it's low-tech and doesn't need amplification (it really carries in that subterranean space); and (c) I didn't want to perform to recorded music since there needs to be some interaction with the audience.

I picked it up back in '92, when director James Slowiak wanted an accordion player for his CPT production of Jean Genet's THE BALCONY. I said I'd learn how to play if I could compose the score. I taught myself by practicing in front of a mirror.

So I spent 8 weeks in Grotowski-inspired rehearsals (I found Slowiak's rehearsal process endlessly fascinating, lots of creative input from the actors) culminating in 3 weeks on-stage as Genet's brothel accordionist. I wandered through the CPT performance space blind as a bat because the costumer thought my glasses didn't look period enough. After the production closed, I'd grown fond enough of the instrument that I couldn't bring myself to return it, so I bought it.

I don't play it much, but I like to use it for occasional comic purposes. I wrote a monologue for CPT's Pandemonium! last year, WELCOME TO THE VESTIBULE, playing the Purgatory exam proctor who administers the Eternity Entrance Exam. Among other irritating things, I sang pieces of Emily Dickinson poems to the tunes of "The Yellow Rose of Texas" and the "Theme from Gilligan's Island". (Try it sometime -- most of them fit.)