The Onion Game

Starting on Wednesday, I started working on this new play by an Irishman named Bryan Delaney called The Onion Game. I was really excited to do this because, well, first of all, this guy is a professional playwright, and second of all, he's Irish, and third: his play is friggin hilarious. In my mind, it's kind of an Irish version of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (by Edward Albee), although it makes a little more sense and doesn't take as many artistic jumps as Albee's piece, which is totally OK by me because I wasn't a huge fan of Virginia Woolf when I first read it. The Onion Game is about this man, Onion, who's writing a novel and thinks he's the greatest novelist of his generation (although he's clearly not). The novel he's writing discusses how shitty his marriage with his wife, Pearl, is, but Onion doesn't want her to see the book because she'll "chop me lad off!", in the words of the play. So Onion pays his son, Ogie, an aspiring pimp, to fake leukemia to distract Pearl for a few months while Onion writes his novel, and meanwhile, the unnoticed other child, Millie, is deathly ill but nobody cares. It's really quite funny.

The play was a part of a reading festival that took place this weekend in one of the theaters on the Vassar campus. In case you guys aren't aware, pretty much the entire point of the Powerhouse Theater is to showcase new works, so stage readings are put on at the beginning and end of the program to give the playwright a chance to see his work performed in front of an audience. It's a really good idea, because you really don't know how an audience will react to something until you see it done, which I'll go into more in a second. So, as a Directing Apprentice, I shadowed the director of the reading, Will Frears. Now, you may not know who Will Frears is, but he's kind of a big deal. You know the movie The Queen? Yeah, well, his dad was nominated for an Oscar for directing it. His dad is Stephen Frears, and he's a pretty big guy in Hollywood. I wasn't really sure how good the relations were between Will and his dad, though, because Will told us that he ran away from home (in England) and came to the United States when he was 16 and lived and went to school in New York. But it was still kinda funny when, sitting right next to Will Frears, I picked up the New York Times and saw an ad for the newest film by Stephen Frears (Cheri). Will was a good director too, though, and I thought he did a really good job with the script. The rehearsals were basically just me, Will, Bryan Delaney, and the five actors sitting around a table and reading and discussing the script. What was really interesting was how Bryan would take notes and come in the next day and be like, "You know, I was thinking about this scene, and I think I want to change this," so he would just cut or add things to the script as he saw fit and, because it wasn't a published work yet, he had the total freedom to do that. It was a pretty awesome experience, to be honest - although there were several times when I became the "Hey, apprentice, why don't you go get me an iced coffee and bagel from the cafeteria" guy, but I was happy to do so.

So after workshopping the show for about 20 hours this week, the play was put on yesterday in the Shiva theater, a small black box on campus. The audience loved it. They thought it was hilarious, and apparently (I didn't see the other three readings) it was the best reading of the weekend, so I felt really lucky to be able to work on the best one. The actors were perfect - if you didn't know they were American, you would have thought they were Irish, that's how good their accents were. I was very impressed. And what was really interesting was how much the audience reaction differed from what I expected. Like this one line, where Onion says, "He's so unlucky, he would fall into a barrel of nipples and come up suckin his thumb!" had people almost rolling in the aisles! The actors had to pause for a good ten seconds. So I guess I've just learned that you never know how an audience is going to react until they react, and that's why the Powerhouse Theater is so important.