Well, in my humblest of opinions, our opening night went smashingly.  Our actors all rocked, the set and lighting looked great, and the sound design was spot-on.   It’s hard to describe the feeling of seeing your work take on a life of its own.  It falls somewhere between wonder and pure delight and slight puzzlement. 

We have four shows left, and there are plenty of tickets left.  Buy some if you want to be cool!  I know cool, trust me.

My co-writer, cast, and crew all got shafted on this one. Maybe it’s because more of them should have come from my hometown.

Oh wait, our William (Stuart Luth) and our casting director (Jennifer Haltman) both hail from my hometown!

Ah well.  Details.

I’m going to give away a piece of the play now.  Not the plot, but some of the dialogue.

At one point in time, et. al. our secondary character, Theodore, comes home and explains to our main character William how he used William’s time travel love situation as an idea for another awful, awful movie to pitch to the Sci Fi Original Features group.  But he and the Sci-Fi Channel have changed a few things, and by the time they’re done with the idea, it barely resembles William’s life.

When you’re trying to come up an awful science fiction story–and I mean really awful–you have to reach into the deepest parts of your past to come up with a good (bad) plotline.  So what do you do?

You find a science fiction story you wrote when you were 13.  And you add silly names for things like “outer people” and “Silver Discs”.

Behold, Theodore’s depiction of the Sci-Fi channel’s “I’m You, But From The Future”.  Which, when I was 13, was titled “Stratosphere” for no reasons that either I can’t remember or just didn’t exist.

And he realizes that the younger version of himself now
remains the only one who can help the humans in the war
against the outer people, and that he needs to get the silver
disc back to his younger self so that his younger self can
make sure the war never happens. But the outer people are
tracking everybody who goes back in time and are looking for
you, so he puts himself in a microchip and implants it in his
best friend’s brain, and his best friend goes back into the
past with the main guy inside of him, and it ends up that he
was always his own roommate since college, but the younger
version of you doesn’t know that!
And then, at the climax of the movie, he gets the silver disc
to the younger version of you, and says, “You’ll know what to
do with this. Vaya con dios, amigo.” And then you say, “How
do you know? How do you know, Gary?” And Gary, he’s your
best friend, he turns to you and he says, “Lance… Don’t you
understand? I’m you… But from the future.”
No, then you say, “It can’t be!” And then Gary says, “look
to your instincts, you know it to be true.” And THAT’S how
you defeat the outer people!

If I remember correctly, my 13 year old version of this story had him implanting himself into his *girlfriend’s* brain because otherwise he was going to die, along with his abilities to save the world from World War 3.

See?  It *can* get more ridiculous.

It’s a fringe festival, so naturally, we’re in crunch time right now.  “Hell week”, as it were.  So for your enjoyment, more rehearsal photos.

Hey there readers!  As the hippest of the hip amongst you know, this week is SHARK WEEK on the Discovery Channel.  Everyone loves Shark Week!  How could you not?  I mean, seriously, check these guys out!

That dude just HYPNOTIZED A SHARK. 

You may well ask, “Jennifer, how does this all relate to your play?  Why are you blogging on your production blog about Shark Week?  Why are you wasting our precious time?  WHY ARE YOU SUCH A WASTE OF SPACE?”  Well, hostile reader, I would answer you this:

Because sharks just starting Time Travellin’.

That’s right, you can now play TIMESHARK II: Medieval Shark Strike Force!!!  In this game you are sent back in time- as a shark- to fight evil clones of Adolph Hitler in medieval Germany.  You can download the game for Mac or PC here.  Do it!  Medieval Germany needs you.

See?  Totally relevant.

Our play centers around three characters: Clara (the time-travel girl), William (the guy who falls in love with her) and Theodore (William’s brother). Late in act two, there’s a moment where the two brothers finally blow up at each other in a scene we like to call “irrevocably disastrous things”. You could refer to it as our “angry” scene, because our two male characters are pretty dang angry. But really, they’re not angry. They’re frustrated. Which is what (theoretically) keeps the scene interesting, and not too one-note.

This Monday, I attended a rehearsal where I got to watch Shannon and the boys play a game with “irrevocably disastrous things”. Stu and Jed did the scene a few times with a less-minced version of the following instructions: one of the characters must be full-on-angry, and the other must be frustrated, but more controlled. If either actor wants to change who is which level of angry, they just do it and the other needs to compensate by changing too.

This is just one of those awesome things for a writer.  Lines you assumed were shouted are spoken through gritted teeth. Lines you assume were spoken through gritted teeth are spoken calmly and coldly. It almost changes the meaning of the scene, and always for the better. And it makes the brotherly rivalry between the two exactly the long-term “I’ve known you my whole life” sort of thing it should be.

Rock, Shannon.  Rock, rock on.

Tickets are on sale RIGHT NOW!

You can get them in three ways:

1) Online (Credit Card Only).  Go to our ticketing page for direct links to onsale performances.

2) Phone (Credit Card Only).  Call (866) 468-7619 and order ‘em up.

3) In person!  Cash or credit or pretty, pretty jewels!  Okay not jewels.  After July 25, you can go in person to FringeCENTRAL (201 Mulberry between Spring and Kenmare) and buy them. 

Go to it, folks!

Hello lovelies!  I am Jennifer Lynn Jordan, the other writer of time, et. al. Welcome to my first blog post.  I hope it’s entertaining.

I’m getting super-psyched about the show.  The summer has been really hectic so far; in addition to getting this production off the ground I am also writing a masters’ thesis.  So it’s been crazy and scary and wild, but now that rehearsals are underway and things are coming together it’s proving to be totally worth it.  So my excitement-to-anxiety ratio is finally shifting into more pleasant zones.  Hurray for appropriate excitement and anxiety levels!

I’m not a theatre person by trade.  I’m a medievalist.  I’m finishing up my masters (with the aforementioned thesis), and in the fall I’ll be starting my PhD in Medieval European History at the CUNY Grad Center.  I have always dabbled in writing and theatre as hobbies, though, and this time dabbling became…a more professional version of dabbling.  So not only is this play the First Full Length Thing I’ve ever written, it’s also the First Full Length Thing of Mine to be Produced.  Or FFLTOMTBP for short.

Anyway, since this is my FFLTOMTBP, I’m excited to see what the response is.  We have a really enthusiastic, talented cast and crew, we have an awesome theatre space, and we have the love and support and encouragement of all the wonderful people at FringeNYC.  I can tell this is going to be a really rewarding, really fun experience.

So the thing that I really wanted to tell you about, besides all my insecurities and shortcomings and hopes and dreams, is that tickets go on sale tomorrow.  You should buy tickets tomorrow! All of them!  Find out more about that here.

Bye for now!  It was nice blogging with you.

As a writer (and also a lyricist) I come from the land of musicals, and it’s always been a disappointment to me that I have never seen a science fiction musical on Broadway.  Little Shop of Horrors is the closest.  Sure, I’ve seen a few Science Fiction off-broadway shows, but in almost every single instance they have been camp.  And good camp is fantastic, but I feel like Science Fiction Camp has been overdone a little, and it’s always because nobody wants to figure out how to do “real” Science Fiction on the stage.

Many people will say that there aren’t too many science fiction plays and musicals because science fiction is “expensive”.  Sure, if the Star Wars musical ever actually had come to Broadway (yes it was a real thing in the making) then it would have been expensive.  But what about, say, a low-budget version of Donnie Darko, which I hear is actually happening.  The point is that Science Fiction is all about the human stories, not about the effects.  The effects support the story.  If somebody travels though time, they don’t *necessarily* need to find man-killing robots on the other side.  They could find snooty British people.  And we all know that snooty British people work out great onstage.

When Jennifer Lynn Jordan and I attended the Fringe marketing meeting, we had gotten there a little early and we had a little extra time to chat with the friendly Fringe folks.  Elana Holy, Fringe’s Artistic Director, mentioned that she had been involved in the off-broadway production of the musicalization of “Time and Again” by Jack Finney.  In the novel of Time and Again, the main character uses self-hypnosis to convince himself that he’s in 1882.  It’s a lot like the trick detailed in “Somewhere in Time” and the book it was based on: surround yourself with things from the time period you want to go to (go to a room that basically existed exactly the same in the past) and convince yourself you’re there.

I can’t imagine it having been very thrilling to watch a guy onstage hypnotize himself into time traveling.  Apparently from what i learned from Elana, the musical version of the play never truly solved the “make time travel onstage convincing” issue.  I hope that Ken Davenport and his crew figure out that same form of time travel for the Somewhere in Time musical, whenever it arrives.

What Elana liked about our play was that she said we’d “solved it”.  “It” being how to convincingly portray Time Travel onstage.

Our solution, if you don’t mind me ruining it for you [if you do, stop here] is: two doors.  There’s Clara, and there’s William, and she comes from 1925 and he comes from 2008.  And when they meet together, it’s a surreal mixture of both of their worlds, with a sense of infinity going on forever.  So when he goes back in time, he takes the door to 2008, and she takes the door to 1925.  And if Time doesn’t want William to travel back to 1925, it doesn’t “let” him go through the door.

Basically, we’ve solved the problem by avoiding to acknowledge the problem at all costs.  Nobody goes to see a play to learn how time travel really works.  They just need a believable enough conceit, and a little bit of theater magic.

I once directed a production of Midsummer Night’s Dream where you could tell whether Oberon was invisible or not at any given moment by whether he was wearing sunglasses.  And so long as every actor onstage ignored he and Puck when their sunglasses were on, you bought it.  And once you’d bought into it, it was pretty hysterical when he would take his sunglasses off and suddenly “appear” out of thin air in front of Helena.  It was simple, and because of that it was most effective.

It’s a shame that there isn’t more science fiction theatre.  There’s so much stage magic that can be more effective and convincing than CGI.

That’s what we’re trying to do.  That’s how we hope you’ll believe our version of time travel.

With two doors.

[I'm attending this Friday's rehearsal; more updates after that.]