pinkytheplay

Tonight is a significant ‘Pinky’-themed anniversary. One night ago, Pinky, the play, concluded its initial run at Main Stage West theater, in Sebastopol. It was quite a night, and people still stop to tell me they were there. Our original actress to play Pinky, Liz Jahren, had to leave the show due to a death in the family, and for the final three sold-out performances, director Sheri Lee Miller stepped in, script in had, to finish the run.

It was terrifying.

And tremendous fun. And the audiences—many of whom were there because they’d heard about Liz’s wonderful performance in the part—were charmed and dazzled by Sheri, boldly leaping in and making them all forget she was holding a script.

And that was the end. Until August, of course, when ‘Pinky’ was reborn, with Liz again in the show, for another ten wonderful performances at the 6th Street Playhouse studio in Santa Rosa.

And then it was over. Again.

Since August, I’ve lost count of the times someone asked me when we were doing ‘Pinky’ again, assuming it would be like my previous show, the one-man-solo-piece ‘Wretch Like Me,’ which I performed off-and-on for two-and-a-half years, and will be revisiting in August, when I kick off a year of fundraising aimed at taking ‘Wretch’ to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2014. Alas, ‘Pinky,’ with its 150 light cues and inconspicuously complex staging, is not so mobile as ‘Wretch,’ and at the moment, there are not plans for Sheri, Liz and I to return to ‘Pinky.’ I am working to get ‘Pinky’ published and into the hands of other theater companies, several of which have asked about when rights to the play will become available.

So there’s that.

At the moment, we are all hard at work on other projects.

Sheri just opened Arthur Miller’s ‘The Price,’ a thick, meaty stew of a play, which she has  directed (beautifully) for Cinnabar Theater, in Petaluma (www.cinnabartheater.org), where it will run (with brilliant performances by Charles Siebert, Samson Hood, John Shillington, and Madeliene Ashe) through April 7. Liz is hard at work on the world premiere of Robert Caisley’s  ‘Happy,’ opening on April 5 at 6th Street Playhouse (www.6thstreetplayhouse.com).

As for me, in addition to gearing up for a return to the world of ‘Wretch Like Me,’ my autobiographical comedy-drama about teenage Christian fundamentalism in the 1970s, I am finishing up my newest play, a fiercely poetic, two-person adaptation of Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s ‘The Little Prince,’ opening in December at Main Stage West (www.mainstagewest.com), directed by Sheri Lee Miller, featuring the brilliant Ivy Miller in the title role.

Those who’ve seen my work will recognize familiar themes: storytelling as theater, the beauty of life and unavoidability of death, the transformational power of the imagination, and the (sometimes) annoying persistence of love in impossible situations.

For the time being, I plan to use this blog to post updates on both of these projects, and further developments as ‘Pinky,’ the play, moves forward as a published play, and then out into the world. I have other plans for ‘Pinky,’ the story, as well, and will keep the updates coming.

For now, I hope you will put ‘The Little Prince’ on your calendars for December, and check back here for information on where you can see ‘Wretch Like Me,’ and help with the move to take it to Scotland!

Every fairytale has an ending.
‘Pinky’ runs one last time, tonight, at the 6th Street Playhouse.

Tonight is the last show in our ten-performance encore run of ‘Pinky.’ It’s a little bit sad, but it also feels good to have watched this show grow so much, to have seen how many people have been charmed, moved and even a little challenged by our odd little love story.
It’s been great getting to work with Liz Jahren, an actress I have always admired but never really knew, until last January when we met up at Sheri Lee Miller’s house for the first read-through of ‘Pinky.’ In our first run of the show, back in March, Liz had to leave ‘Pinky’ before the final weekend after her father died suddenly, meaning that when we performed our final show together, we didn;t know it was our final show. We all thought we still had one more weekend. Sheri stepped in, on book, to complete the run, and she was brilliant.
That last weekend was incredibly memorable, unexpectedly getting to perform on stage with Sheri. Still, there was also a tiny sense of incompleteness, the way it all played out with Liz. Because of  that, it’s especially meaningful that tonight Liz and I will be able to have the closure that comes from approaching a final show knowing that it’s the last time you get to play the characters whose lives you’ve been stepping into for weeks.

It’s been a good run.

Sheri, who spent her short few days off between performances of ‘The Lion in Winter’ to restage ‘Pinky’ for the larger space at 6th Street, once again proved what an incredible director she is. One of the best parts of the whole ‘Pinky’ experience has been the friendship that Sheri and I have established over the process of developing the play, then rehearsing and staging it . . . twice! We have decided to keep the partnership going. Sheri will be directing my next play as well.

First, of course, I have to write it. So  . . . I suppose I will now be getting to work on that.

But, maybe I won’t start till Tomorrow.

Because, hey, I still have one more performance to go. One more chance to fall in love with ‘Pinky.’ My hope is that we have a full house tonight, full of friends, fans, and family, theatergoers, gamers, nerds, romantics, and dreamers of all kinds, so we can all experience this very special love story together, one last time.

Tickets available while supplies last at http://www.6thstreetplayhouse.com

No longer together as a duo, the sibling-team of Swedish musicians known as Detektivbyran made two mysteriously offbeat records before disbanding. Their infectious accordion-synthesizer-toy piano composition ‘Karlekens Alla Farjor,’ has been adopted as ‘The Pinky and David Love Theme.’

“What is that piece of music?”

From the moment the lights go down at the start of ‘Pinky,’ the audience is dropped into Pinkyland with a playfully magical piece of music. A blend of synthesizer, glockenspiel, accordion, and toy piano, the music seems to be simultaneously happy and sad, ethereally childlike and grounded in wistful sentiment.
When asked what the piece is, and who recorded it, I often reply, “It’s the Pinky and David Love Theme,” though that’s only my nickname for it.
The piece is titled ‘Karlekens Alla Farjor,’ by Swedish brother-and-brother-and-drummer trio Detektivbyran.
Featuring Anders “Flanders” Molin, Martin “MacGyver” Molin, and Jon Nils Emanuel Ekström, the oddball group released only two albums in the mid 2000′s, both of them classics of modern electronica-folk.
Often described as sounding like “mysterious circus music,” the albums of Detektivbyran have been used in countless European commercials and television shows. The first time I heard their 2005 album Wermland, as I was beginning the writing of the ‘Pinky’ script, I recognized a sense of youthful wisdom, hope colliding with regret, knowing that they were, in a way, the very emotions that I was exploring in the play, only expressed in music rather than in words.
Wermland became part of my writing process. Whenever I would begin to write, I would make sure that I could listen to some or all of the album, just to get me in the right mood. I listened to it for months and months. There were other pieces of music that I listened to during this period, but Wermland was the biggie. Once the script was done, I included two tracks from the album on a mix-tape I gave to Sheri Lee Miller, the play’s director. The tape was a mix of all the songs and tunes that I listened to during the writing of ‘Pinky,’ including the cut ‘Karlekens Alla Farjor,’ (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dB3IjYdOgco) the English translation of which is apparently ‘Calling All Ferries.” That’s ‘ferries’ as in ferry boats.
I was thrilled when, several weeks later, Sheri mentioned that she’d selected the music she wanted to use in the production of the play, and that the piece was her favorite piece from that mix tape.
I have to admit, that’s exactly what I’d been hoping for.
How perfect that Sheri also recognized how perfectly matched to ‘Pinky’ that one weird little piece of music is. And that is how ‘Karlekens Alla Farjor,’ by a defunct Swedish music group, became the musical soundscape of ‘Pinky.’

TWO MORE PERFORMANCES ONLY
For information about tickets and showtimes visit http://www.6thstreetplayhouse.com

Trivia Fans take note: The working script for ‘Pinky,’now playing at the 6th Street Playhouse, contains 8,366 fewer words that the text of William Shakespeare’s ‘Hamlet.’

In this blog, over the last 40 posts, I have been answering the various questions which have been posed to me before, during or after performances of ‘Pinky.’ As we begin our final weekend tonight, I thought I would answer a question I was asked at the after-party on opening night of the current run.

“How many words are in that script?”

That’s a very computer-era question, isn’t it? Before we had word processing programs with built-in word count functions, nobody asked how many words were in a play. They might ask how many scenes there were in the show. They might have asked how many pages were in the script, or perhaps ask an actor how many lines they had in their part. But rarely would anyone think of a play in terms of the number of words the actors had to speak.

For one thing, who would want to count them? I seriously doubt that in Shakespeare’s day anyone would have wanted the job of counting the number of words (“. . . words, words!”) that he’d written down in Hamlet. For the record, Hamlet contains 32,241 words. Romeo and Juliet contains 25,850 words. Shakespeare’s shortest play, The Comedy of Errors, contains 16, 248 words.

So, how many words are in the script of ‘Pinky’?

The version we are using for the 6th Street run contains exactly 17,484 words, including stage directions and the names of the characters who are speaking. So, this means that ‘Pinky,’ a play for two actors, is 1,236 words longer than Shakespeare’s shortest play.

Whatever that means.

Actually, to be clear, one should consider the fact that, as written, ‘Pinky’ really does have a high number of words that are never spoken. Using the magic of word-count functionality, I determined before the first run of the play that the script contains just under one-thousand uses of the character’s names. So when the script reads . . .

DAVID:
Ashley knew Pinky the best—so I started with her.

[Entering a memory in which he talks with Ashley and Jake]

“YOUNG DAVID”
“Ashley . . .  does Pinky ever say anything about me?”

DAVID AS “ASHLEY”
“Why don’t you just ask Pinky?
Take the leap, David. Talk to her! See what happens.”

DAVID:
“Good advice, Ashley. Jake! What do you think I should do?”

DAVID AS “JAKE”
“Oh, Dude. Negatory! You should definitely not talk to Pinky! Maybe you should just back away slowly, man. Listen. I don’t know how to tell break this to you, but . . .  I’m pretty sure she’s into somebody else.”

. . . that 103 word chunk of script actually contains 21 words that aren’t meant to be spoken. And for what it’s worth, the original working script of ‘Pinky’—the one we went into rehearsals with back in January—contains nearly 21,000 words. When developing a new play, it is not uncommon for the playwright to make edits as she or he gets a sense of what the play is like on its feet. In that case, there was one very hard weekend where I cut nearly 4000 words of the script (the event I now think of as “The Blood Bath!”) and presented the cuts to Sheri. Let’s just say that was a very hard conversation, and some of those cuts ended up being over-ridden by Sheri, most significantly David’s opening monologue, which I decided could possibly be lost without killing the story. I still think that, though that monologue is one of my favorite pieces of writing I have ever done in my life. Sheri, however, made the call to keep the monologue in, and to find other cuts here and there as we continued the rehearsal process.

“We will buy that monologue back, line by line,” she said.

And we did.

So, as Liz and I prepare to take our unusual little love story to the stage for our last three performances, letting those 17,484 words (spoken and otherwise) play out in front of our final three audiences, it is my hope that, however many words there really are, they all add up to three memorable nights of theater, as David and Pinky wrestle with what it means to be young and confused and full of dreams. Because, ultimately, a play is not judged by the number of pages or lines or words in its script, but by how well it makes you forget that there was ever a script to begin with.

Tickets and information can be found at http://www.6thstreetplayhouse.com

We’ve had three days off since Sunday’s matinee of ‘Pinky,’ and as much I relish the opportunity to focus on other things, to catch up on work, maybe go see other shows (I’m heading down to Marin Theatre Company tonight!)  . . . I find that I really do miss performing our story almost immediately once our weekend of shows is over. So . . . I am looking forward to this weekend, and our final three opportunities to tell the story of David and Pinky and the crazy things they do for love.

‘Pinky’ has been a major labor of love for all of us involved, and I think we will all miss it when it ends. Not that we won’t all have plenty to keep us busy. Sheri is already on to other projects, performing in ‘The Lion in Winter’ at Main Stage West while preparing to direct Conor McPherson’s ‘The Weir’ there in October. Liz goes immediately into rehearsals for Dario Fo’s ‘We Won’t Pay We Won’t Pay,’ opening at Cinnabar in a couple of months. I will be turning up the heat on the writing of my next play, an unusual two-actor adaptation of ‘The Little Prince’ which I am developing with Sheri. Lori and Andy (Stage Manager and Assistant Stage Manager) are on to other things as well.

So it’s not like we won’t be busy once ‘Pinky’ closes.

But this has been a special show for all of us, and we will surely miss it once we are on to those other projects. The opportunity to bring the story to life again at 6th Street Playhouse has been incredibly special, and I’d like to say thank you again to Craig and Michael and Jo for all of their support and enthusiasm.

And now it’s all over except for the last three shows.

We hope that everyone who has seen it has been touched by it over these three weekends, all those who’ve been challenged and charmed by ‘Pinky,’ will have memories as fond and as magical as ours.

For information about show times and tickets visit http://www.6thstreetplayhouse.com

Christy’s on the Square, in downtown Santa Rosa, was one of the two unlikely spots where playwright David Templeton found himself writing major sections of the romantic comedy ‘Pinky.’

After a performance, there are often folks waiting in the lobby to say hello to the performers. Sometimes they have feedback, sometimes they have questions. Occasionally, there are people who want to ask me something related to the script. After all, most theatergoers do not have the opportunity to meet the playwright, so sometimes a person will take advantage of the playwright being one of the actors. Last weekend, someone asked me a question  no one has ever posed before, or at least, never immediately after a performance.

“When you write,” he asked, “where do you write? Do you have an office? Do you write in your living room or kitchen? Do you go to a coffee shop? Whenever I write, I like to go to the coffeeshop. So . . where did you write the script for ‘Pinky’?”

Funny he should ask.

When I write my columns and theater reviews, I often write at home, though I do have a small office in Petaluma established for that purpose as well. When I write larger projects, I have found that, like the guy in the lobby, I do well in coffee shops.

‘Pinky’ was a different story.

I discovered Christy’s on the Square (www.christysonthesquare.com) —and its amiable bartenders Jason and Justin—a couple of years ago, when I stopped by one early evening to hear a friend who was playing the jazz piano there. I quickly saw that Christy’s was a spot a person could relax in, especially between the hours of 5 and 8, when Christy’s clientele is primarily professional people and business folk unwinding with friends after work. It’s a very classy place. Soon thereafter, when looking for a quiet spot to do a bit of writing while maybe having something a bit stronger than a cup of coffee, I hauled my laptop over the Christy’s, sat at the bar, and discovered that this was, in fact, a great place to get some work done—and have a nice cold vodka martini (best martini’s in town, by the way).

I began writing ‘Pinky’ in March of 2011, and somewhere around May of that year, it became clear that the vibe at Christy’s was  fertile ground for working on that particular play. At least once a week, in the late afternoon, I’d appear, and do as much work as I could before the later part of the evening, when the volume goes up and the place becomes more crowded. I’m not sure when I told Jason and Justin that I was writing a play, right there every Tuesday night, but once I did, they became huge supporters of the project, making sure I wasn’t distracted by curious visitors wanting to know what I was doing, occasionally acting as sounding board when I would be working out some particular scene.

In fact, one of the play’s most memorable speeches—the one we call The Balloon Animal speech—was written in its entirety there are Christy’s. I knew I needed a scene where David would try to convince his friend Jake to help him find out what kind of guy Pinky was looking for. “What if it turns out Pinky is looking for a guy who . . .?” That’s as far as I’d gotten. I knew I wanted David to ponder that question my imagining Pinky’s perfect guy as something really outrageous, but what? Sitting there at the bar, I let my eyes wander around the room, letting various possibilities fill the blank in that sentence. “What if it turns out Pinky is looking for a guy who . . .?” I took in the stage, where the musicians were setting up. “What if she’s looking for a guy who plays in a rock and roll band?” Too obvious. My eyes took in the basketball game on the T.V. screen. “Plays Basketball for the Lakers?” No. My imagination began to morph each idea into its most outrageous alternatives, and as the basketball player became an Olympic athlete, a movie star, an astronaut, a tightrope walker, a Circus ringmaster, a clown . . . boom! I had it. “What if Pinky is looking for a guy who, I don’t know . . . blows up balloon animals?”

The rest of the speech was done within thirty minutes. I immediately called Sheri (the play’s director), and read it to her over the phone, as Jason moved closer to hear the speech. When I was done discussing it with Sheri, after I’d hung up, he said, “Wow! This play sounds hilarious!”

The quiet setting and all-around beauty of Moshin Vineyards was a perfect spot for David’s fall and winter “writing retreats,” where the combination of the winery’s charming Guest Suite and the close access to miles of creativity-fueling hiking trails along the river made for the perfect spot to finish writing the play . . . as the deadline for completion loomed.

But there’s another spot that played a big part in the creation of ‘Pinky.’

My friend Julia has worked for Moshin (www.moshinvineyards.com), as the Director of Hospitality, for a while now, calling attention to Moshin’s award-winning hand-crafted Pinot Noir and other wines. She and her husband Dan (the two of them produced my last play, the solo-show ‘Wretch Like Me’) have been supporters of the Pinky Project for some time. I wrote the two opening monologues in the small Mendocino cabin-in-the-wood owned by Julia’s grandmother. Late last year, as the deadline to complete ‘Pinky’ was drawing closer and closer, Julia offered me the use of Moshin’s gorgeous guest suite, a very cozy room attached to the Moshin’s rustic winery building and tasting room. Just like at Christy’s, the staff and owners of Moshin (thanks Rick and Amber!) were very interested and supportive of my project, curious about the themes of the play.

Sometimes, writing a play just cannot be accomplished in short spurts of two or three hours. You need to just go away and write for hours and hours and hours. That’s what I did during my writing retreats out at Moshin. During the daylight, I would walk down to the river beneath the Wohler Bridge, a notepad in my back pocket to capture the ideas that would spring to mind as I walked, playing various ideas in my mind.

Some of the most pivotal decisions of the ‘Pinky’ playwriting process took place out there, either inside the suite or out on the trail. It was 2:00 in the morning when, as an experiment (during my first overnight visit to Moshin Vineyards), I decided to invent Pinky’s infamous Prince Charming list. I always knew I’d refer to the list (the real Pinky really did have a P.C. list), but since I never knew what was on the list, I wasn’t sure the play would include any of those items. By 3:00 a.m., I had finished the list of  made-up P.C. attributes . . . and the entire play took a sudden leap forward.  Later, while walking along the river, I stumbled upon the play’s final twist, mentioned during David & Pinky’s show-closing epilogue. When I thought of it, it literally stopped me in my tracks, as I dropped to a crouch to write the entire scene right there beside the river.

So. Long answer to a short question.

Where did I write ‘Pinky?’ With a little help from my friends, I wrote ‘Pinky’ all over the place: in a cabin, in a bar, and at a winery in Healdsburg.

Soon I will begin serious work on my next play.

Where will I end up writing that one? I’ll let you know.

For information about ‘Pinky’ tickets and showtimes, visit http://www.6thstreetplayhouse.com

“Do not meddle in the affairs of wizards . . . for they are subtle, and quick to anger.” Just one of the Tolkien quotes dropped in ‘Pinky,’ making up what passes for advice for the socially-challenged character of Troy, whose big summer project is trying to memorize every word of The Fellowship of the Ring.

In ‘Pinky,’ which begins its second week of performances tomorrow night (Thursday), one of the most enjoyable parts, for Liz and me, is performing the various oddball friends who make up our gang of nerdy, bookish, off-the-wall friends. Though the characters of Curtains—the nickname of David’s slightly-scary little brother Curtis—and the perpetually allergic Troy, have the least lines of any characters in the show, they manage to make a strong impression with audiences.

Curtains is another character who, though slightly based on my real little brother Jef (he long ago dropped the additional F from his name due to its time-wasting redundancy), is primarily fictional. Jef did have a number of swords and axes on the walls of his bedroom (though not anywhere close to 50), and in the swordfight that takes place late in the show, he was the last one to die (a fact that gets one of the show’s biggest laughs), but Jef is actually a gentle, decidedly non-psychotic guy. In the play, his nickname of Curtains was just something that popped into my head as I was writing. In many of the shows and movies I grew up with, whenever there was a gang of kids, at least one of them had a nickname. So I wanted one of the David-and-Pinky gang to have a weird nickname, too.

With Curtis being a slightly scary guy, with all those weapons at his disposal, it was believable that his nickname would be the same word used to denote the death of a character in a cartoon (“It’ll be curtains for you! Curtains!”). And it sounds like Curtis, so . . . there it was.

In the very real version of the play’s climactic sword fight, Jef did play an orcish character, and he did die last, but there is one detail I left out. During the real fight, in which we used some of those now legendary swords and axes, something went wrong. Jef’s memory of the incident is a little different than mine. All I remember is that, after I dispatched the two other evil kidnappers—who really did abduct the real Pinky from her front porch (with her mother’s enthusiastic permission)—and I was running through the well-rehearsed fight routine with Jef, at the top of the little waterfall in the park, Jef made a move I didn’t anticipate, and instead of blocking with my sword—I blocked with my left hand.

Yeah, I know.

Here I was, trying to impress the girl of my dreams by having her kidnapped and then rescued by me . . . and I ended up getting myself wounded, for real, literally bleeding all over the ground as I finished up the fight and then (fake) killed my little brother.

I did consider using that in the show. After all, it is pretty hilarious. But in the end, it seemed better to leave that detail out of the finished script. I did write a version of it, for the record. But the problem was, the gaping wound I’d just introduced into the story became a character of its own. Eventually, it became obvious that the play would be better off without David getting sliced by Curtains . . . right at the moment of his biggest triumph.

One embarrassing thing that really did happen—a detail I did leave in—was the part of the sword fight in which I battle Troy. In the play, Pinky narrates the fight as I act it out, and in the midst of my skirmish with Troy, she describes a moment where David tries to kick the battleaxe out of Troy’s hand . . . and misses by at least a few feet.

“It was a new move!” I explain in the show. “We hadn’t had that much time to practice it!”

Hilarious. Troy is loosely (very, very loosely) based on my good friend James, who (my profound apologies to James) was actually a very articulate guy, light-years away from the character whose only way of communicating was through the words of J.R.R. Tolkien.

When I wrote the original draft of the script, I stumbled upon the idea of having a guy so frightened of the real world that he memorized The Hobbit and the Fellowship of the Ring, and borrowed snippets of that text whenever he needs to say something in public.

Troy became that guy.

And for the record (this is for you, James!), Troy has been described as “strangely sexy” by more than one love-struck audience member.

Something that makes ‘Pinky’ special, in the way I’ve written it, is that it is the same story told (back and forth) by two different people. So in my version, I play all of our friends my way, and when Pinky (Liz) tells the story, she performs those same characters, but does her version of each one. One of the challenges for our director, Sheri Lee Miller, was to find physical attitudes and vocal mannerisms for each character that each of us is able to replicate, in some way.

That’s one of the things that makes the ‘Pinky’ experience a one-of-a-kind theatrical adventure.

Information about tickets and performance times can be found at http://www.6thstreetplayhouse.com

One of several answers to the question: “What’s the craziest thing you’ve ever done for love?”

With our first three performances of ‘Pinky’ now over, it’s time to rest for a few days, enjoying the glow of our opening weekend, while recharging our batteries for the upcoming four-day weekend that begins Thursday night. One of the fun elements we’ve brought to this encore run of ‘Pinky’ is the Crazy Love Note Board, a bulletin board in the lobby, where we have posted the question, ‘What’s the Craziest Thing You’ve Ever Done for Love?” We will be collecting these short fun comments and stories, and sharing them on this blog, up under the heading CRAZY LOVE. We will add more next week, and of course, readers are welcome to comment directly to the blog with their own stories of adventurous activities launched in the name of love. Some of what we’ve already received are surprising,  funny, charming, sad,  a little scary, and a little wonderful.

Just like ‘Pinky.’

For information on tickets and performance dates visit http://www.6thstreetplayhouse.com

David (David Templeton) and Pinky (Liz Jahren) perform on opening night of ‘Pinky,’ running through August 11 at the 6th Street Playhouse.

Opening night for ‘Pinky’ came after a long, long day.

With such a truncated tech/rehearsal time, we had very few chances to run the show entirely, with lights and sounds and projections. So Sheri called a morning run-through for 9 am, and there we were, coffee clutched in our hands, preparing to do one last dress rehearsal, just eleven hours before our official debut performance.

Things went well, and served to take away a few of those pre-show jitters and self-doubts a performer always has just before a new show (or, as with ‘Pinky,’  a new production of an existing show). After that, the plan was for cast and crew to relax for the rest of the day and come back refreshed and ready.

Yeah, right.

Who really relaxes before opening a show? There are few things as exciting as waiting for the moment when you finally get to bring all of your hard work out to the audience. Adrenaline surges all day, making it impossible to really relax completely . . . though most theater folks are fairly good at distracting themselves from the rush that courses through their veins. But it’s there, that weird, buzzy, breathless feeling that only comes from either knowing someone is in love with you (yeah, that was a line from the play!) . . . and from knowing your show opens in just a few hours.

“Places for act one.”

That was Lori, our stage manager, telling us the waiting was over . . . and with that, we moved from the rehearsal phase of recreating ‘Pinky,’ into the performance phase. The audience was wonderful, and their responses to the show were exactly what we hoped: lots of laughter, a bit of cheering, the occasional sniffle, and plenty of smiles.

After the show, my favorite comment came from a young audience member who said that, halfway through the show, he became aware that his face was hurting. It took him only a second to realize that that was because he’d been smiling so hard for the first part of the show.

That’s a great reaction.

And a wonderful way to start a run of a show as meaningful to us all as ‘Pinky’ is.

‘Pinky’ runs through August 11 in the Studio at 6th Street Playhouse. Visit http://www.6thstreetplayhouse.com for information on tickets and showtimes.

Director Sheri Lee Miller chatting with Scenic Designer David Lear during installation of the ‘Pinky’ set. The technical team had just four days to bring “Pinkyland” to life inside the Studio Theater at 6th Street Playhouse.

When ‘Pinky’ opens tomorrow night, less than 36 hours from now, it will mark the end of one of the busiest weeks I’ve ever experienced. Audiences entering The Studio at 6th Street Playhouse will see a bright, colorful set of green and blue slabs, steps, multilevel platforms, and a hanging garden of lights, tucked up against the ceiling, illuminating the magical world we have come to think of as “Pinkyland.”
To many, the set will seem simple. But it has been no simple task installing all of that lumber, and all of those lights, in time for tomorrow’s opening night. For one thing, the technical team has only had four days to make everything happen. The previous Studio show, Gutenberg: The Musical, ended Sunday afternoon, and only then could any work begin on installing Pinkyland. Fortunately, the Gutenberg set was fairly minimal, so light designer April George (who also designed the beautiful lights for Pinky’s original run last March), could get right to work hanging light elements for her deceptively complex Pinky light design.
Set designer David Lear, working with Vince Mothersbaugh (who’s done the actual building of the set pieces), have had to fill a bigger canvas than in the show’s earlier run, as the Studio—with audience seating on three sides of the stage—provides the actors with a much larger area to play on.
And “play” is definitely the right word.
‘Pinky’ is set largely in the memories of the grown-up Pinky and David, who take turns telling their side of the story, frequently morphing back into their teenage selves. The set, painted in bright springtime colors (to capture the feeling of emotional awakening), has a bit of a playground vibe, with various things for young David and Pinky to climb, stand and sit on, leap over, lie on, and (in the playfully whimsical climax), even sword-fight across.
In April’s light design, more than 120 light cues signal the characters’ movements back-and-forth into the fantasy land of their sometimes overlapping memories. Add to that a pair of surprising power-point “lectures” (including one tracing the history of Prince Charming through history), and a lusciously whimsical score employing music from the Swedish instrumental band Detektivbyran (sound design by Stephen Dietz), and there is a lot more going on in Pinkyland than just two actors standing on stage telling stories.
Given the short tech time available, it’s a marvel that our team has been able to accomplish so much in so few days. As April reminded us last night, she once said, “It’s not possible.” And now that it somehow all came together anyway, with the first of ten performances beginning tomorrow night, she’s sticking to that.
“It’s still not possible,” she laughed.
Pinky, of course, is all about young love, a time when the impossible seems just within reach. How perfect that our outstanding design team has proven that, impossible or not, dreams do come true . . . even if it takes some long hours and late nights to make it happen.