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Fourth Street -- Preliminaries
Jun. 25th, 2010 01:00 amAt eight this evening a group of about 50 people met in the programming room at Fourth Street for the first public reading of Jo Walton's play Three Shouts on a Hill. The text of the play is here.
Tom passed a hat full of pieces of paper with the names of characters written on them. In some cases, if the part was large, the paper would limit a reader to the character in one of the five acts. I suggested to David, who was not reading, that he do group photos of the five Brians, Kevins, Aideens, and Tureens, but he has not done them yet, in any event. I drew the King of the Africans, and I have to say that I miss my magic chariot that goes up waterfalls.
The play is almost impossible to describe; it begins with a scene that made me think, "If you meet an obnoxious old man on the road, don't kill him. He may not be your father, but he's somebody's, and no good will come of it." It ends with the Queen of the Cats' deconstructing the entire situation. It has Midwestern and Fourth Street in-jokes. Also a huge number of other in-jokes, but I especially appreciated those. We were all supposed to shout together at the end, but I actually could not do so, because I was too choked up. Myth will do that to you, even self-parodying cat-deconstructed post-modern myth. More precisely, really, Jo will do that to you.
I'm hoping to record something of Fourth Street every day, but I am not altogether sanguine about the possibility.
It was a grand beginning, in any case. I got to talk to Cally and Martin, to Jon Singer, to Elise, to Anne and her convention friend J, to Janet (who liked Tam Lin, to Tom, to Jo, to Jennet, and to Sarah. Many of them will appear in the LJ guises hereafter, but I am too tired to put in the squiggles just now.
I shall retire and dream of the magic horses that go with the chariot. "They're a set."
P.
ETA: Link fixed -- sorry!
Tom passed a hat full of pieces of paper with the names of characters written on them. In some cases, if the part was large, the paper would limit a reader to the character in one of the five acts. I suggested to David, who was not reading, that he do group photos of the five Brians, Kevins, Aideens, and Tureens, but he has not done them yet, in any event. I drew the King of the Africans, and I have to say that I miss my magic chariot that goes up waterfalls.
The play is almost impossible to describe; it begins with a scene that made me think, "If you meet an obnoxious old man on the road, don't kill him. He may not be your father, but he's somebody's, and no good will come of it." It ends with the Queen of the Cats' deconstructing the entire situation. It has Midwestern and Fourth Street in-jokes. Also a huge number of other in-jokes, but I especially appreciated those. We were all supposed to shout together at the end, but I actually could not do so, because I was too choked up. Myth will do that to you, even self-parodying cat-deconstructed post-modern myth. More precisely, really, Jo will do that to you.
I'm hoping to record something of Fourth Street every day, but I am not altogether sanguine about the possibility.
It was a grand beginning, in any case. I got to talk to Cally and Martin, to Jon Singer, to Elise, to Anne and her convention friend J, to Janet (who liked Tam Lin, to Tom, to Jo, to Jennet, and to Sarah. Many of them will appear in the LJ guises hereafter, but I am too tired to put in the squiggles just now.
I shall retire and dream of the magic horses that go with the chariot. "They're a set."
P.
ETA: Link fixed -- sorry!
