This is a very interesting play. It’s deceptively simple – 3 actors and an almost bare stage. It will keep you guessing for sure, and at an hour and a half long straight with no intermission, it’s not asking a lot of your evening.
We could use a lot of help over the next few weeks. Not just directly in getting butts in seats, but getting the word out. It appears for the second straight production we’re going to open with virtually no pre-press.
Maybe somewhere I wasn’t so shocked when Books (abridged) didn’t get the kind of play we’re used to. I racked all that up really to American Stage having done the show in November.
This time around though I’m stumped. And angry, to be honest. Neil LaBute is a prolific, important young voice in American theater. His works are accessible to people who don’t normally come to the theater as can be evidenced with the amount of his work that’s been translated to film (The Shape of Things, In the Company of Men, etc). This is the southeastern United States premiere of This is How it Goes, and I can’t find a damn thing about the show in any paper, and we open tomorrow.
As I also said we didn’t really get the kind of pre-press we’re accustomed to with Books. We still have one major paper here that’s yet to even send out a critic and review the show.
Oh, and we’re competing with story after story about Jon Stewart, monster truck pulls, Spamalot and Gasparilla. Ugh. In short – we’re just getting killed. And some critics have the stones to say that we’re the ones ruining audience development in the area by the material we choose. Yeah, because no one was going to find their way down to Bayshore on Saturday if there wasn’t a thousand stories in the paper on it for the two weeks leading up to it. That’s helpful …
It’s been a discouraging few weeks, I can say that for certain. I hear today is basically the most depressed day of the year, and I can buy that.
If you’re not dressed up like a pirate and loaded all weekend, we could really and truly use the support. Oh, what the hell, even if you are drunk and dressed like a pirate we could use the support. I will be dressed like a pirate a few times in Books, and if the week continues like this I’ll likely be drunk after the show …
