Aktualizovat z Prahy

Greetings, world, from a different corner of the internet, today!

I'd been hoping to give you an update from Prague a lil' sooner than today, but life is pretty fucking crazy over here. Now that we got our first performance out of the way, however, I'm hoping I can give you a few more updates ere I return to the States.


First things first: the show.
Following our final rehearsal for Venus and Adonis before we left, I felt really confident in our play. We tell a great story, the abstract elements provoke some thought, and the thing moved smoothly. When we got here, though, I started feeling the pressure ramp up. For one thing, there's posters with my face on them posted all over the city. It's a weird feeling, walking around a foreign city and sporadically seeing your face taped on a wall.
Guy Roberts, our host and head of The Prague Shakespeare Festival, has worked his ass off promoting our show. He's a PR machine. He's also, incidentally, a kick-ass individual. But, he'd also never seen the show. He was putting a lot of blind faith in our ability to show up and do something amazing.
The final bit of pressure was that, well, when we originally staged the show I start the play completely naked, facing away from the audience. Through the course of my actions in getting dressed, the audience may get a glimpse of dick. The day before I left, I check the Prague Fringe site, and our show is advertised as having full frontal nudity. Er... So when I meet up with my director in Prague the first thing he says to me is, "So they've been advertising our show as having full frontal nudity." Okay, after he said "hi" it was the first thing. So we changed the start of the show just a bit. When the lights come up, I'm greeting the audience in a pose reminiscent of The Vetruvian Man. It's honestly not too bad (though I guess I can't speak for what the audience thinks). The weirdest part of it all is when the audience walks in, the front of the stage is covered in a plastic sheet we're projecting faces onto. As the play starts, I walk in between the projector and the sheet so my shadow gets thrown on the screen. I hit my pose, Venus rips the screen away, the lights come up, and the show begins. What's weird (and funny, I admit) is my shadow hits the screen at exactly the right height so my penis is in the same spot as the mouths of the projected people. And there I am, a shadow with his arms thrown wide, like I'm getting blow jobs from a whole bunch of random faces.

The really good news is that opening night went really really well. The audience seemed to love it, and we got a pretty kick ass review in The Prague Post. The after-party was a holy fuck-balls avalanche of drinking in a German beer hall that's been around since 1499 followed by a stumbly trip to a vodka bar.

But that also means you might have to wait until later to get a pictoral rundown of the first couple days. It's 3:30 in the afternoon here and I'm still a wee bit hungover.