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• SPECTACULAR SEPTEMBER-A DIARY
• By Joel Markowitz

September was filled with many memorable theatre highlights.In this column and in my podcasts with local actors and directors, I try to capture these moments for you.    Lace up your running shoes, and I challenge you to keep up with me as we stroll around our theatre community.

On Saturday, September 1^st- I set up my new home at Bethesda Midtown North, near the Twinbrook Metro Station. Isn’t moving so much fun? NOT! To the shock of the staff, but not to my family and friends, the new place is set up in 2 days. I work fast.

On Wednesday, September 5^th at 6 PM, my first house guests arrived- Lorraine and Tim Treanor,  Debbie Minter Jackson and James Konicek. We ate our way through a nice tossed salad, garlic bread and a chicken rigatoni dish, topped it off with assorted mini homemade brownies, pecan pies and cheesecakes while recording our first DCTS Audience Choice Awards. Yes. now it can be revealed - the undisclosed location of that grand awards show was my living room. It was a blast - full of laughs, and oh that voice of our host James - that Orson Wellesian timbre oozing out of those vocal chords. (more…)

Happy Friday! As the final weekend of Fringe dawns, we hope you can come check out our performances. Yesterday we had tech rehearsal in the afternoon and a show at 7 pm. Tonight we have a show at 5 pm, and Saturday at 4:30 pm!  We’ve been preparing and rehearsing for a long time, and are very excited to finally have an opportunity to share it with an audience.  More pictures and a tech play-by-play under the cut.

step into the light…

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Okay, I haven’t even told you how my opening night went - despite our wishes for an empty theater and fears of a totally fubar show, we had a decent house of 31 people. We went an hour over on our tech rehearsal, my projectionist didn’t show up (the venue manager kindly stepped in), and we didn’t get to run the show during tech, so opening night kind of served as our dress rehearsal. And aside from a couple of technical snafus and me completely forgetting the ending monologue (nobody noticed! in fact, awesome review from Sam Goldblatt, Fringe Marketing dude), we had a great show. I met a cool guy, Art Levine, who gives me a shout-out in his blog - he asked me a lot of great questions about the show, which I love because the more people wonder about the universe I’ve created, the more solid it becomes in my head. And it is a VAST universe.

I also met the fantabulous Slash Coleman, who is a very talented solo artist, but he’s not an intense handful like some people we know (read: me). He gave me a LOT of info about getting out there as a solo performer - that’s all he does now! He quit his day job! It IS possible!!

I’m also featured on this cool video on Theatermania.com!

So, I still have 4 shows left and I’m sellin’ those tickets! I pulled a Jimmy Hogg today and went to a handful of venues and just passed out postcards as patrons were leaving shows (Jimmy’s the best self-promoter I know and the guy SELLS OUT his shows - and not just ’cause they’re good)… I got told by a Fringe Volunteer she thought that was “tacky” (not because she saw me doing it, but another show was doing it), but HEY! That’s FRINGE for ya!!

I’ve taken a handful of photos and they are HERE!
My next show is tonight!!! YEAH!

Happy Wednesday! How nice to find a mention of Trojan Women in this morning’s Washington Post’s Fringe coverage. The article points out many of the festival’s female-centric shows, among which we are proud to be counted.

Under the cut: pictures from our director’s triumphant return, and preparing to storm the Source Theater tomorrow. (more…)

T-minus four days…

Well, we’ve managed to drag ourselves through the first hectic weekend of the Fringe. Many shows were seen, many drinks were had. Three of the four Trojan Two-Timers’ shows have closed: Cordelia’s Fool, The Farthest Earth From Thee, and Low Tide Hotel. All three were delightful performances that unfortunately are now only a memory. The last performance of Nutshell is on Tuesday night, 9:45 at Woolly Mammoth - it’s a great silly jungle-y time and I hope that some of you can make it!

Meanwhile, we are gearing up for tech, and have just received communication from our long lost director, on her way back from the untamed hills and valleys of distant Canada! Read more about that under the cut, as well as the unexpected hilarity of rehearsing a tragedy.
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Saturday night’s performance:

We got a standing O! Thank you, thank you.

Our biggest house yet, we opened the doors at 6:30 knowing we were missing 1 cast member. Bobby Smith was tied up in traffic because of an accident on the Bay Bridge. JR, our stage manager, kept me posted on his route, and, 2 minutes to curtain and the last guests were hurrying into the Source, JR told me he was on Florida Avenue. “Yes, but he’ll never get parking in time.” I said. And, on cue, the car parked in front of me pulled out, and I stepped into the spot to guard it. Sorry to those 2 motorists I turned away from the choice spot, but we were in a fix! (So to speak. See the show.) It worked. Bobby swooped into the spot, hurried inside, and 5 minutes later was onstage for the opening number. (We held the show a few moments.)

The show deepens with every performance. Darius, our music director, is having a good time onstage, and it’s infectious. The performers are finding the heart of each song. It’s a beauty to behold.

After the show, someone told me he heard our interview on WPFW, and when they played ‘Scars’, told his wife. “Drop everything. We’re seeing this show.” What did they think? They wished we had a second act. Maybe someday.

For now - drop everything. Come see this show - Sunday, or next Tuesday or Saturday. You’ll leave very, very happy.

PS: Thanks to everyone who is leaving comments on our website. Fran Landesman is reading them from London, and is very cheered.

SAT, July 21

We had a fabulous opening performance Friday afternoon. The cast made Darius’ arrangements shine. The staging was smart and sexy.  I heard comments like ‘This is better than anything I saw in the Fringe last year - and I went to 30 shows.’ ‘I’ve got to see this one again.’ ‘Fantastic.’ ‘Truly funny.’  Music to our ears.

Then Nelson Pressley of the Washington Post asked “so where has this show played before?”

Truth?

They were seeing our second run-thru. When we showed up at Source for tech rehearsal at 11:30 Friday morning we had never run the show from front to back.  Got in one run-thru, where we discovered  we had a 45 minute show, Michael Bobbitt made some last minute tweaks, cast took a short water break, while the house opened, and we were on!….

Photos coming tomorrow.   

I can’t believe I’m back on the g***amn computer. I have been finishing up the animation for the past 7 hours. No joke. I had to pull myself out of the house and force myself to come downtown just to get away. But here I am, because I brought my computer with me, back on the computer. But now it’s to do my programs and do a lil bloggin’. And the animation… still not done. It took me SEVEN HOURS to do TWO MINUTES of animation. On the computer. I can’t imagine in the old days of Mickey Mouse’s heyday when they were doing this stuff by hand. And I’m just moving pictures around - I’m not really making anything animate. Geez. But the truth is, I love it… almost more than performing (if your love for something can be determined by the amount of blood, sweat and tears put into it as I haven’t been on my feet in a rehearsal for 10 days. What? Omigosh that can’t be true. Guess why I have to get everything done tonight?) So, anyway, that’s my story.

Last night was fun! I was definitely making it up as we went along, but everyone’s improv skills were serviceable and you’re only as strong as your weakest link (me!). But we had a great time and it doesn’t hurt to have Damian Sinclair as my personal pimp. “Have you met Courtney?” was his tagline of the evening and I can’t say I opposed! Also, the City Pages set up a little “confessional booth” where one would confess their Fringe sins on a video camera. After a few Jamesons, I was confessing to my torrid 2006 affair and once I found out people were finding out within 2 minutes, I ran over to him to confess what I had confessed… but he had already heard! Ah well… we had a good laugh. That’s one of the things Fringe is about when you’re single. That’s what theatre is about, actually. Really. It’s all about who you sleep with. My kinda bizness.

Jenny comes into town tonight!! And then tomorrow is rehearsal in the morning and tech and then SHOW!! Yesssssss. I really can’t wait.

I just ate a watermelon wedge. I hate watermelon. I’m that hungry. And now I will wash it down with Wild Turkey.

Fringe has officially started!

Hope everyone had a great time at the opening night bash, I missed it but am hoping to see some pictures and read scandalous tales about it online.

You may wonder why I haven’t been writing about rehearsals. We actually aren’t having any at the moment - we’re on a planned break. One of the reasons for having an invited-dress was that we knew that half of us were going to be very very busy leading up to Fringe week. The goal: to have a completed show before the schedule got chaotic. That way we could have a brush-up rehearsal right before tech and go into performance with very few last-minute changes. Also, our director Rachel has been out of town this week - she’s on the annual Canada trip with Round House Theatre. Each year some of the staff and a group of patrons/subscribers travel to the wild north to go to the Shaw Festival.

Also, about half our cast are two timers - people who are involved in more than one Fringe show. It’s an awesome undertaking; we revel in our lack of free time, we scoff at our friends who get proper sleep, our nutritional health has plummeted, and our families are curious as to whether we’ve completely lost our minds. The double-crossing Trojans even have a secret salute/dance move. All of our other shows open today, so read about them under the cut! (more…)

A) I love that “Nutshell,” the play by my friend and who-I-wanna-be-when-I-grow-up, Callie Kimball, totally is doing the “T-Minus” thing on her DCTS blog too.  YEAH!

B) um,  did I forget to mention I got a, um, mention in the Washington Times??? Thank yoooooou.

C) buy a ticket to my show, man.