Antarctica in Baltimore

Glass Mind Theatre Company's production of my play Antarctica will be opening this Friday in Baltimore, which is very exciting news indeed. Information and tickets can be found here.

I'm sort of a legendary control freak, so this just sitting back and waiting for the curtain to come up is pretty much an exciting new adventure. When we were doing the production of the show I directed in 2007, we constantly asked "are you a Winnie or a Magda?" (we were going to create an internet quiz, but never got around to it). Obviously, I have turned into a total fucking Magda. But when my BFF from high school saw the show, she thought Jessi Gotta, who played Winnie, was pretty much playing me. So, yeah. I'm the writer, so I'm both. We did decide that the worst kind of people were Winnies who mistakenly thought they were Magdas.



I know I harp on Ernest Shackleton and fairy tales pretty much constantly, but please read his book South and East of the Sun and West of the Moon if you haven't already. Really.

But if you're in the Baltimore/DC area you should definitely go and check it out. I will likely be there at some point the last weekend.

FringeNYC 13: The Antarctic Chronicles

Men Wanted

For Hazardous
Journey,
Small wages
Bitter cold,
Long months of complete
Darkness,
Constant danger,
Safe return doubtful.
Honour and recognition in
Case of success.

Men Wanted is my favorite prose poem. Of course, it's not really a poem at all, it's the advertisement Ernest Shackleton placed in The Times in 1913 when he was in search of men to accompany him on an expedition to journey to the South Pole. The best part is that he received hundreds and hundreds of responses.

I'm a little obsessed with Antarctica. I've mentioned this before here on this blog when I went to see Werner Herzog's remarkable documentary. Most people reading this know I wrote a play called Antarctica about two teenage girls and their journey to a fictional continent of ice and snow called "Antarctica" and their search for something else, for something that would make their lives different, better. For reasons I don't entirely understand, an inordinately large part of my psyche is taken up by dreams of a landscape that is so beautiful and severe it looks like another planet.

This brings me to Jessica Manuel's The Antarctic Chronicles, a show in which she tells of the year she spent in the icy south after answering the modern equivalent of Shackleton's Times advert. I loved this show, but I've been sitting on this review for days now because I'm having a lot of trouble writing about it. There are so many thematic parallels between Manuel's non-fiction, but stylized account, and my fictional play about a pretend Antarctica, that it just feels a little uncanny to me. Both pieces are about very young American women who feel lost and at loose ends and view Antarctica as a path to a new self and a meaningful life. Both pieces use the phrase "there are no polar bears in Antarctica" repeatedly. In both, girls are driven nearly mad by the brutal environment. But hers is real and mine is not, so enough about my play and on to hers.

Jessica Manuel spent a year in the McMurdo Station on Ross Island where she worked as a fuels operator, lived through a winter of darkness and monitored the color of her pee. She also saw the sun set and then rise again in the space of a minute, went from FNG (fungie, i.e. Fucking New Guy) to pro with "ice time", made crappy yet hilarious films, drove a rig, fueled planes, visited the Russian station, fell in and out of love and changed her life. That's it I guess, I mean what draws people like me to the idea of travel - as a catalyst to life change. In my play Magda says if they travel to Antarctica "it will change everything". For Jessica Manuel it did, she found a sense of self and a purpose that was lacking. The show itself is huge amounts of fun - hilarious and self-aware.

Winston Churchill thought Shackleton's Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition of 1914 was a waste. The Pole had already been located by Amundsen and Scott, who died there. He went anyway and encountered disaster, but pulled every single person who went with him out alive. He was revered by his men, and rightly so. His story is extraordinary and inspiring in the most old-fashioned heroic sense. I firmly believe that there are things in the world worth doing and that the world in the the early 21st century is both vast and tiny. The age of exploration is mostly over, but one's life can still be altered by journeys to icy lands. As Ernest Shackleton once said: "We all have our White South."

After my show Antarctica closed in FringeNYC 2007, a male acquaintance told me that he enjoyed it, but he thought the story of Polar exploration was essentially a man's story. All I can say is that he doesn't have any Ice Time whatsoever.

Because it took me such a ridiculously long time to write this piece, The Antarctic Chronicles has closed in NYC. But hopefully she'll remount it again.

(photo: Zoee B)

Herzog & Antarctica

Just a quick line into the ether-- but if you get the chance, go see the new Werner Herzog documentary about Antarctica: Encounters at the End of the World. Now, most people reading this know I am, ahem, a little obsessed with the giant, cold, Southern continent. For those that don't know, I wrote a play about Antarctica, pretend Antarctica, anyway.

That said-- SEE IT! It's full of obsessed, eccentric marine biologists, volcanologists, PhDs who wash dishes, a greenhouse-tending linguist, and one mad, unstoppable penguin who runs amok, into the mountains to a certain death. Really, what else could you possibly want?

Herzog narrates it himself. If I had my choice, I would have Werner Herzog provide the narration for my life, in real time. I think he may be completely mad, but he sees no reason to get excited about it. In the director's commentary for Fitzcarraldo (which is arguably just as entertaining as the movie itself, as it is the one or two most legendary shoots in the history of film), he calmly tells of how a crew member was bitten by a deadly poisonous snake, and how the crew member immediately picked up a chain-saw and cut off his own foot, thus saving his life. Mind you, this anecdote is told in the same matter of fact tone a more conventional director might use to speak about craft services, or perhaps an actor flubbing a line.

And while you're renting Herzog documentaries on my recommendation, you may as well watch My Best Fiend, too. If anyone knows where one can find a complete film of Klaus Kinski's Jesus Tour, please let me know.

This was a much longer posting than I had anticipated. While speaking of Antarctica-- if it melts, we all die. Now turn off that light in the next room!