Dragon's Lair

If you’ve never felt this, I can’t explain it to you properly. Just accept that this is the greatest feeling in the world – this feeling you get when you’re sitting in a room, watching something you’ve created, and hearing the crowd behind you laugh and yell in approval. I’ve only been high a few times in my life, but this feeling is a million times better than that.

As mentioned elsewhere, Dragon’s Lair, a “one-act” play I wrote for the Tin Ceiling is currently being performed. Simply put, it’s about a guy who’s not happy with his current position in life and wants more – even though what he wants is completely impractical. Aloicious, clerk to Sir Gawain, wants to be a knight. Throw in two knights of questionable moral character and with time to kill before they ride off to battle, and hilarity ensues as Sir Gawain and Sir Lancelot put Aloicious through their own special “knight training program”. Think Revenge of the Nerds meets Excalibur, with a dash of Full Metal Jacket thrown in. This is the hour long version of the 10 minute play I submitted to Short & Sweet Singapore that came in 2nd place for people’s choice. So I knew at least 10 minutes of the play was good, but I was really worried that maybe I’d written an hour long Saturday Night Live sketch.

So, as is becoming my thing, I sat down last Friday night and waited for the first minute to be over. If no one laughed, I was ready to walk out. I’d been careful not to eat anything all day, but my stomach still waited to empty whatever contents it could find all over the theater floor. The lights came up, Aloicious walked out on stage, and within moments came the first chuckle. Then more. And finally, the whole theater is in stitches. I relaxed and let the euphoria settle in. It was going to be a good trip.

I’ve had this desire to entertain people as long as I remember. I’m a known attention whore who’s loud in a bar, louder at a party, and dangerous around jukeboxes and microphones. It’s not so much a desire to be seen as it is a desire to control how people think of me. “That Chris,” I want them to say, “he’s a funny mother fucker.” That’s why this play was so nerve wracking. If I bombed, I was ready to quit. I was ready to admit that my talent for writing may not have extended any further than a paragraph of dick and fart jokes in a blog somewhere. Luckily, I got that much needed external validation that the socially retarded crave. Now I can handle if I fail in the future, because I know what I’m capable of.

The perfect moment for me was about half way into it. The crowd is crazy about the over the top way a scene is being played out. My wife and my parents are all sitting in the same row as me and when I see my dad, he’s doubled over laughing. My father, for any quirks he may have, has entertained me with his guitar and his paint brushes as long as I’ve been alive. Not being his biological son, I didn’t really inherit his artistic eye, and both of my younger brother’s have far surpassed my guitar playing skills. The private nature of my only real artistic outlet, my writing, hasn’t offered many chances to hear him remark on my talent. To see him laughing though, and to have him tell me afterwards how good he thought it was, made the night great.

As everyone told me they liked it, the feelings I experienced were bittersweet. It’s definitely great to get myself out there creatively. I never feel as good, or as comfortable as I do when I’m writing. However, the knowledge that on Monday, I’m back at my desk adding up columns of numbers bugs me. I’ve gotten out my copy of The Prophet and have been reading it a lot lately. When I’m down, there’s usually something in there to help me.

“Your joy is your sorrow unmasked. And the selfsame well from which your laughter rises was oftentimes filled with your tears.”

That pretty much says it all.

So for now, I’m a clerk. Maybe someday, I’ll be a knight.

Enough of that. On to the production.

Derek Simmons’ directing is amazing. I was banned from rehearsals, so I can’t tell you what his style was like. For all I know he carried a collapsible baton with him and threatened to beat his actors regularly. But when you watch the play you get the feeling that he showed up at rehearsal with a 24 pack of Pabst and said, “Here’s some beer. Make me laugh.” I think his attitude towards the material is one of the reasons it works so well. His directing immediately sets the audience at ease as they realize this play isn’t “THEATER”, it’s just a casual time with some friends who are going to tell you a story. Derek was obviously comfortable with the script and made additions and subtractions that just made the damn thing funnier. So odds are that while people are saying how good the writing is, they should be praising the director instead. Considering he’s also responsible for the set design (my settings didn’t make this an easy task), costume design (which turned into some of the coolest knight outfits ever – created by Becky Dorough), and sound…he was a pretty busy guy.

Somewhere in middle America is a secret government lab where a team of scientists and engineers are staring at an empty surgical table with broken restraints on it, and they’re wondering exactly where in the hell specimen 23 escaped to. Well, specimen 23 is going by the name Joey Walsh and he can be found onstage at the Tin Ceiling as Aloicious. Walsh is endearing, frenetic, and kinetic in his portrayal of the meek victim of a cruel hazing. Now he’s a stage actor so he may cringe when he reads this, but watching him on stage is the only time I’ve ever been reminded of Jack Black and Frank Oz at the same time. His portrayal of Aloicious is so sympathy drawing that at one point my wife leaned over to me and punched me for putting the character through so much torture.

Chris Macke (pronounced like “Mack Daddy” with out the “Dadd”) as Sir Gawain, and Chris Wilson (that’s three guys named Chris involved in this production for anyone keeping track) as Lancelot, are Maverick and Goose. They’re Wayne and Garth. They’re that one guy and that other guy. The two play their characters very well and have an almost palpable chemistry. Macke’s Gawain is the more mature of the two knights. He’s not above taking part in Lancelot’s plan, but he is the one who’s mindful of the consequences – or at least how those consequences will affect him. Wilson showed that he understood exactly what I was going for when I wrote the characters. Knights are dicks – and he proves it over and over again. Seeing them together as they torment poor Aloicious is beautiful and evocative of every jocks vs. nerds movie you’ve ever seen. You want to hate them for what they’re doing, but you can’t – because you’re laughing right along with them most of the time.

Andy Byrd completes the cast as Roland of Slychester, an innkeeper who had an unfortunate encounter with a dragon. While the rest of the cast is allowed to bounce around, Byrd has to sit still for his entire part. His exaggerated facial expressions and natural sarcasm though make you forget that Roland is no more animated than the rock on which he sits. He’s a damned funny guy.

The reviews:

Riverfront Times

KDHX

Edited to add:

From you can't please them all category, here's the review from the shitty little "news"paper that exists solely so rich folks can stroke off to pictures of other rich folks at parties.

The Ladue News



A note about Blackbird White…

Richard Greene’s KDHX review suggests that you sneak out after Dragon’s Lair is over. Not only would that be rude, but I think it'd be wrong. I’m not going to go into a long defense of the production, as I’ve nothing to do with it, but I will say that I found it pretty damned entertaining, and I've seen it twice. English has his criticism of his own play up on his blog and you can read it there.