Orion Rising

Orion

I am a year older since my last post. I think I am more comfortable with 27 than any other age hitherto. It fits. When I hit 26, I almost felt the age I was supposed to be. But I am a solid 27, an age with so many threes: 3 x 9 which is 3 x 3  (3x3x3; 3³) which is 3 years less than 30. Three stars in the triangle that create the major shape of the Libra constellation, the newest sign–once part of the constellation Virgo the Virgin and then part of the Scorpius the Scorpion, represented its claws–and the dimmest. The first Earth-like planet to be found lies in the direction of this constellation: Gliese 581 c with located one and a half degrees above and slightly to the left of Zubeneschamali.

I have been drawing three dots on my wrist and ankle for the past 6 years as some sort of reoccurring tattoo for the non-committal. I realized, yesterday in fact, that I don’t think the symbol had some significance in a past life (as colleagues at Blueberry Hill once mused); I think it stems back to Orion’s belt, the first constellation I learned in preschool, a friendly familiar star cluster for much of my early childhood.

Orion the hunter stands in the night sky in wait of the Taurus, ready to loose his arrow at the bull’s first shudder. There are, as is the case with so many myths, multiple versions of how Orion entered our astrological pantheon. He was the lover of Eos, the Dawn, and then a follower of Artemis. Artemis killed him, but the circumstances are disputed. One tale tells of his death being punishment for a rape of one of Artemis’s other followers. Artemis sent a scorpion that poisoned the proud hunter. This is why Scorpio’s sign, when rising, chases Orion’s stars beneath the western horizon.

But I will subscribe to the other tale, as unlikely as it seems. Artemis and Orion fell in love (despite Artemis’s wishes to her father that she remain an eternal virgin devoted to the hunt); they were to marry. Yet Artemis’s twin-brother, Apollo (heir to Olympus) deemed their half-bred arrangement inappropriate. While the three visited the sea, Orion went walking out into the water. Soon only his head bobbed above the surface. Apollo challenged his sister, alleging that she could not hit the small speck far out on the water. Not one to back down from a challenge to her abilities as an archer, Artemis fired an arrow out over the sea, hitting the speck squarely. The speck disappeared under the water. Moments later the body of Orion washed up on the shore.

Having just returned from Robert O’Hara’s Good Breeding, I have a new investment in our old myths, those little stories of divine romantic-novel-esque-comic-book-pornography. I wonder if Christianity will ever become mythology, if we will find new gods, if the Bible will become relegated to a kind of holy fiction, as I would argue has happened with the stories of Olympus through theater. Theaters may be some of the last temples worshiping Zeus, his siblings, and his bastard lot.

Libra–the scales–is the only one of the twelve on the ecliptic that is not named for a living creature. While we may be balanced, I wonder if it also signifies why we are slightly removed, why we are more comfortable on the periphery, why we favor thought over emotion. Maybe it is time to choose a substitute sign, to stand in when emotion is called for, and maybe I will choose Orion.

Orion the devoted. Not the rapist.

Warning: this entry may be a fever dream.

There are ten third-year MFA students rolling around in an orgy of pretense three miles to my east: it is the opening of Robert O’Hara’s Good Breeding, and the orgy I speak of is no metaphor. They are literally performing an orgy on stage. And I wouldn’t miss it for the world!

Except I’m missing it.

I have been told I do not get sick with grace. I have been fortunate in that I do not get sick often, but because of this, when I do get sick I do not have the necessary experience to handle it well. Of course by writing this, I am jinxing myself for the season and will probably contract something unpronounceable tomorrow (I am frantically knocking on wood as I type this entry with one hand) that will force me horizontal till President’s Day.

At 3pm on Thursday, I joked that I had gotten a sore throat from all the chocolate I had eaten that day. Some kindly donors had donated a box at some fundraiser the night before, and against my wishes (because I have a registered problem with chocolate) it was living on my desk. But it was not the chocolate, for by 7pm I was canceling my evening plans: seeing the Plastic People of the Universe play at Slims, for free, I might add.

We are wrapping up our run of Rock ‘n’ Roll. In my mind, the show is over: I moved on to other projects weeks ago. The only things dragging me back have been quesitons from the Huntington in Boston, where R’n'R will be traveling next, about their program. Yet, weeks ago we learned that PPU was coming to town: a shocking coincidence considering the band has a huge importance to the play (not to mention Czechoslovakian history). It was to be my opportunity to experience live dramaturgy!

But I am getting wiser. I am slowing down. I didn’t go to Slims, and I went to work yesterday only long enough to grab the reading I could do at home anyway. I am staying in this evening. No point in spreading germs to a bunch of modernized Greek deities and the reconceived Atreus family; I cannot imagine participating in a fake orgy with a runny nose. That would just be indecent.

behind the scenes

Sometimes dramaturgy stops feeling like theater. I’m not complaining. Sometimes I don’t want to think about theater, to be perfectly honest. Arguably, it isn’t all that healthy to think about fictional worlds constantly, and I am happy to live on that research/writing-bridge between reality and fantasy.

As I write this, my fingers feel free because I’m not restrained in what I write. Stoppard’s Rock ’n’ Roll, which we are doing right now, has a line about how censorship is not always as obvious as someone telling you not to write something. You don’t write something because you understand that the consequences of what you write will not be favorable. No one tells me not to write in sentence fragments filled with comma splices in the study guides we produce for our mainstage shows: I don’t write in sentence fragments because I want to be perceived as a professional writer. A professional writer worth keeping on the payroll during this economically troubling times.

Of course, the content of this blog—as I continue to understand what its purpose is in that murky land between personal and professional (Timothy Douglas, who is directing our third year MFA students in Robert O’Hara’s Good Breeding challenges his actor before each rehearsal to understand what their creative selves are contributing to the world)—is not free from self-censorship. I have warned myself to stay positive about specific happenings at work or with local plays and writers, and when I see value in being critical, I will try to mask that negativity in ambiguity. It is interesting being employed in theater. And by interesting I mean precarious; interesting just as I would assume balancing a 100 feet in the air on a length of wire is interesting to an aerialist.

Lately, I have been doing a lot of writing for the study guide of our next mainstage show, Jane Anderson’s The Quality of Life. Writing and editing. And, at the same time, producing a program for Good Breeding, which I insisted should have dramaturgical pages devoted to explaining the House of Atreus (because who knows about those poor bastards except people who took Latin in high school and classical studies majors) and a glossary of the Greek gods (because one never tires of hearing about how screwed  [see! self-censorship!] fucked up those deities were.) And dramaturgical pages I was granted! Extra work doesn’t bother bosses so long as you’re the one putting in the extra hours.

So this was a week of working in a theater without dealing with anything that would resemble theater to Joe Six-Pack (another Palinism from the VP debate that I am going to adopt: I am of the all-of-the-above approach. LOVE IT! Because you know when you were most likely to check the all-of-the-above bubble on an exam? When you don’t know the darn answer!). Actually, the debate was about as close the a theatrical event as I got.

Although I did almost walk in on a fight call to drop off drafts of bios for the stage manager to pass around to the cast of Good Breeding. Thankfully Electra grabbed my arm before I opened the door: “You can’t go in there. You’ll get hurt,” she said as only a true classical tragic-heroine would.

And back to my books I scurry.