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finished usher orientation. they said there was no upper limit to how many shows we could attend. also we get league of chicago theaters membership plus discounted or gratis tickets to shows we don't usher, depending on individual house policy. we can usher the matinee and evening performances of the same production (to compare the acting choices) if the house manager approves it, and then come back and do the same thing the next day. i'm going to see so much free theater it's unreal
so chicago has a program where you can sign up to join a volunteer "usher corps" and they give you on-the-job training and send you to different performances at different venues all over the city. you're basically a temp usher and you get to see a really wide range of theater for free. i'm going to do what rhea seehorn did in DC except instead of training to be an actor i'm just an unemployed disabled guy without discretionary funds to see plays who wants to understand How Plays Work
my main goals for 2026 were "talk to people more/actively work against the inertia of isolation" and "learn about film and theater/watch as many movies and plays as you can/try to understand the aesthetic & technical mechanisms of both media" and i'm making pretty decent progress on both fronts!
comprehensive list of My Transformative Theater Experiences
The Dybbuk af yidish over Zoom in 2021
Angels in America bootleg from 1995 where the video quality was so poor you couldn't even make out the actors' faces on stage or tell characters apart except by height, voice, and gesture
Stop Kiss by the Hyde Park Community Players (multiple performances because I got obsessed)
conclusion: sometimes a play itself is really good no matter the circumstances of its staging (?)
going to see a play about lesbian nuns in the 60s next week. tickets were sliding scale/pay what you can so i paid the minimum, which was $5. theaterquest 2026 is back on, baby!!!
i think what's so revelatory about the as-if part of the practical aesthetics handbook and the ~method(s) is that it combines abstraction with analogy and in so doing makes abstraction legible to me in a way it never is otherwise. you are not comparing a textual situation to another situation based on the literal events taking place or characters' literal relationships to one another, you are addressing the subterranean stratum, which means you have to understand what is happening abstractly. rhea seehorn is talking about the ski lodge scene from the finale & said obviously she's never had her eggs stolen by a global hivemind, but she's felt betrayed, and she's felt profoundly embarrassed for letting herself be happy / believe herself to be loved against her own instincts, only to find her instincts proved right. so it's all on the Seele-plane, it's all abstract & phenomenological, while the literal events don't have to be comparable at all. the phenomenology can still be analogous. and that makes modern naturalistic acting possible
had a revelation about the medium of theater on the bus but can't articulate properly rn because of post-ictal lexical retrieval issues because i had an absence seizure but it's like. plays are different every time. it's not like covers of songs where there is a definitive Original Recorded Version it's like when someone would compose sheet music with lyrics or an orchestral score and distribute it and then everybody would devise their own interpretation and perform it live whether in their parlor at a party or on stage at a club or for a symphony audience but every performance would be DIFFERENT even if the same people were doing it. like it's always a surprise! and it's all folk music logic all the way down! you never see or hear the same show/song twice even if you know the text by heart, even if it's the same players playing!!!!!!! that's INSANE! that's magic! that's the pre-gutenberg of recording technology and it makes you use your memory accordingly!
haven't been able to stop thinking about stop kiss since i saw it. what if i went to see stop kiss again on friday or saturday and took notes on the acting and staging choices this time. and also wrote down what, if anything, they did differently than last friday's performance like rhea seehorn did when she was volunteer ushering at woolly mammoth. i'm going to make myself an improvised apprenticeship for playwriting like she did for acting because the difference between a written play and an acted performance is more or less the difference between a score and a symphony orchestra's rendition. it doesn't make sense on the page and you can't imagine how it's "supposed to be" until you have the technical skills & tools to translate the symbols into the dynamic, living art in your mind. and i don't have those for theater yet, so i get very little from reading plays, i still have to Watch them and understand how Acting and Staging and, like, Dramaturgy work lol
