And thus I clothe my naked villainy
With odd old ends stol'n out of holy writ,
And seem a saint, when most I play the devil. var sc_project=10697654; var sc_invisible=1; var sc_security="d4c4e1a1"; var scJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://secure." : "http://www."); document.write(""+"script>");
I love how Smithers is a mostly OOB collector. He's got some in box but either he's fine with collecting vintage Malibu Stacy OOB and restoring them or as is from other collectors. I could listen to him ramble on about how he organizes his display for hours
sick earnest post! as you have brought your theatre project into the webseries fandom circles, may i ask if the webseries experience tm informed your theatre practice in any way? what do you carry with you from that into acting/writing/directing now? best of luck w/fringe:-)
Great question!
I think the thing NMTD/LLL has given me the most is a love of a good adaptation, with proper care and attention given to the medium (as in like, okay what if this book was a webseries, but why a webseries specifically). The way I got into it in the first place was that in high school I was the Shakespeare Guy (Costa McClure who?) but hadn't really been involved in that much filmmaking, but when my friends were adapting Shakespeare I was like hello, it's me, Shakespeare guy, and the rest is history.
Now I've written immersive horror shows based on Lovecraft and Chambers, a version of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf except with Santa, Mrs Claus, and a couple of elves, or the aforementioned Wonka sequel, so re-tellings are very much my jam, and would never have realised that without TCW.
I also have a love for audience involvement in the story directly, but I suspect I was already a fan of that and getting to play with the audience camera in NMTD helped me realise that and push that even further.
I do miss literary webseries even though it feels like they're less of a thing nowadays. I have a vlogseries adaptation I've written but no idea if it'll ever happen... watch this space I suppose!
[Earnest post alert]
Hi tumblr: you may remember me from my time acting in Nothing Much To Do and Lovely Little Losers. (if you don't know what that means don't worry, and if you did know but didn't know I was on tumblr, now you do!)
I just wanted to tell you all that I've co-written a play with @balmoras, and I also act in it. The reason I'm posting about this on tumblr is because it's literally fanfic we put on stage. This play would literally not exist without tumblr and my misspent youth here. It's about the four bad kids from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory stuck in a house together dealing with their childhood trauma 15 years on (I play Augustus Gloop). There's shipping, angst and found family.
Waiting for Wonka is performing at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival at the Gilded Balloon Patter House 5th-16th August, 11:40-12:40, and you can get tickets at the link below.
I know that many of you won't be at Edinburgh Fringe but if you are, please come and see us (or tell your friends who WILL be there, or come up for a day or two if you're able!) and you can always donate to our Ko-fi (https://ko-fi.com/halftrick) to maybe help us get it to other places in the future. It would mean a lot to have people in the audience who really get what we're all about, yknow?
[Earnest post ends.]
5 - 16 AUG - 11:40Fifteen years after the competition that ruined
their lives, five damaged adults try to understand what happened to t
“With the Blond Ambition Tour, satan has been re-released into the world.” - Pope John Paul II. (A day after Madonna performed in Rome in July of 1990)
Some stills of Jonathan Harker in full Gothic Heroine (TM) mode as he explores Castle Dracula from the footage of our Edinburgh fringe production of Dracula's Guest, with Frederik Bang as Jonathan Harker and Magnus Kelly as Count Dracula. We'll be posting more clips/photos/behind the scenes stuff from this production in the lead up to Dracula Day on May 3rd.
this is a foul-tasting medicine (truth will mess you up)
As someone who's been able to dive directly into s2 of The Pitt fresh off of finishing s1, it's been fascinating to see how Frank Langdon in recovery is somehow both seismically different from his pre-rehab self and yet still so similar in so many little ways. This man has clearly gotten therapized six ways to Sunday since the last time we saw him, something which (i) was very badly needed and (ii) seems to have provided him with a lot of genuine benefit and scaffolding for self-improvement. There are a number of different textual elements of s2 that can be used to exemplify this shift within Langdon, but I think it may be most succinctly captured by the difference with which he approaches patient care now as opposed to in s1; where before his focus seemed to be predominantly aimed at jumping between flashy cases at Mach speed, this time around he's actually making a real effort to be a thoughtful and considerate doctor writ large. He's consciously patient and attentive with the more "pedestrian" cases he's handed this season (beads-in-nose kid, eyelash glue girl, etc., and of course Becca) in ways that he almost certainly never would have dedicated the time or effort to be in s1, and what's more is that this shift in behavior doesn't feel jarring or disingenuous because of the morsels of softness we did see out of him in s1 underneath the layer of vaingloriousness that's now been stripped off. Langdon can in fact be good when he wants to be, and he really, really wants (and has) to be right now, both because he is a legitimately well-intentioned person and also so that he can try to keep what remains of his life intact in the wake of his dismissal and nascent reinstatement.
But. BUT! The core spark of that indomitable Langdon ego still persists into s2 despite it all! We see him bristle at Robby putting him on triage like it's something beneath him despite this being his first shift after the better part of a year away! He seethes when Whitaker intervenes with the med orders he tries to submit for Louis despite the fact that Louis was literally Whitaker's patient! He leaps right back into the saddle of trying to educate Santos from the position of a superior like it's nothing despite her clear misgivings and the ocean of bad blood between them! These interactions also carry obvious baggage on the part of the other characters involved so there's a lot of hay to be made from those angles, too (though not within the scope of the current post), and in the case of the last two examples, Langdon is also clearly trying to do what he thinks is the correct thing in his role as a senior resident - but that's what makes this all so much more murky and compelling. Full stop: Frank Langdon is not a bad person. He clearly very much wants to do good and be good. He wants to be a good doctor, and now that he's out of the miserable pit of active addiction, we are getting a chance to see that really shine to the fullest. But with that being said, Langdon's still got this kneejerk tendency to be proud and self-centered and reactive when challenged that clings to the way he handles things. If we want to wander away from the explicit text of the show a bit and engage with more subtextual elements (as well as some word-of-God from Patrick Ball), these tendencies are clearly borne from a gnawing existential anxiety that Langdon carries about needing to be needed and be seen as maximally competent in everything he does, which is a deep-seated issue that predated (and very likely fed into) his addiction. He NEEDS to always be okay and great and never falter. He NEEDS people to see him as excelling rather than just meeting the baseline. He NEEDS to get a A+ in hospital in order to live (sidenote while we're here: PBall, we are gonna need to take it out to the parking lot over your decision to put Favourite Daughter by Lorde on your Langdon playlist). And while a lot of the sharpest edges of Langdon's issues have been tempered by the 10 months of work that he's had to do on himself, these underlying kernels still remain, which is painful and wonderful and real! You can't take the bite out of Frank Langdon that easy!
In light of these points, I absolutely love the degree to which the show is letting Langdon's return to the ED play out in such a messy and half-cocked sort of way. Just as his addiction didn't automatically make him the absolute devil, being in recovery doesn't automatically make him an absolute saint, and Langdon's clearly still got a long road ahead of him both in terms of mending fences externally as well as facing up to his lingering internal issues. He's still frequently falling back on putting up a facade that everything is fine (hello, lying by omission about the state of your marriage!) and flinching away from reckoning with the full scope of the bad shit he did in s1 (hello, not acknowledging within your apology to Santos that the whole reason you crashed out on her was because she clocked your med theft!). I think PBall's quote about Langdon's s2 Achilles Heel coming from the fact that he needs to be on the front foot about everything INCLUDING addiction recovery is particularly salient and encompasses a lot about why he's still tripping up the way he is. It's an INCREDIBLE choice to have him insist in the midst of his apology to Mel that his addition never affected his work (because my man, please be so for real, it definitionally did)! It's an AGONIZING choice to have him so doggedly determined to foist an apology on Robby that he literally ends up cornering him screaming on the helipad! It's a DIABOLICAL choice to have him start snapping at Santos again in the midst of attempting to apologize to her because of the fact that she flat-out refuses to buy that he's genuinely trying to be better (which is a whole separate issue btw)! Despite the aforementioned therapization, this man is clearly still so bad at sitting with any feeling of inadequacy or rejection, and at the end of the day those feelings are literally inevitable in his present situation. Like yes, Langdon absolutely deserves an honest chance for healing and growth, and yes, addiction is a disease and not some sort of moral stain on his soul, but there are also things he did during active addiction that other people are under no obligation to forget or forgive. Santos may never forgive him for how awfully he treated her on her first day when he was supposed to be her teacher! Robby may never forget the venom Langdon spat at him in the ambulance bay when he knew Robby was vulnerable! Albeit alluded to off-screen, his relationship with his wife may now be damaged in a way that can't be repaired! He's going to have to forever carry the knowledge that he was stealing medication from the very patients whom it was his duty to help! The kicker within all of these things is that they epitomize the sort of failure that Langdon may never really be able to walk back - and while he may claim that he gets this (like he does while arguing with Santos), this concept is also fundamentally anathema to his personal suite of perfectionistic neuroses.
All of this meandering discussion is to say that (as of writing this post-s2e11), I think we still have more Frank Langdon ego destruction left to see on our screens. I for one am extremely excited to see him get rawer and messier as he continues to tangle with the fact that things aren't going to suddenly revert to being okay again no matter what he does, and that sometimes the truth of the matter is that you fuck up and have to live with the fallout without being able to fix or avoid it, but that this also doesn't invalidate the worth of the work you've put in to grow and change in the aftermath.