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The Sound of Summer

(Author's Note: Yes, I have been a negligent blogger, but Nebraska Notion is back! Here is a post that is a year late, but to a Brood IV Cicada, a year is nothing. Enjoy!

Hang on!

They say that smell is the most evocative of the senses. The mere whiff of a scent closely associated with our past can, if only for a moment, speed us back in time and space faster than any invention H.G. Wells could have conceived. For me, sound is also such a time hopping vehicle, often as fast and efficient as smell. An old song comes on the car radio and I am on summer break from college, driving down a different highway in a different state, and the song is new and climbing the charts. The cacophony of children playing during recess at the elementary school on the corner carries me further back in time, to a blacktop far away, full of children who are now on the final lap of their careers, playing with their grandchildren, caring for elderly parents. Some may no longer be alive, a sobering thought. This past June, I took such a sound-powered journey back to the summers of my childhood courtesy of the very loud and rather large insect known as the Cicada.

It all started when I opened the Lincoln Journal Star on May 25^th 2015 and read an article entitled “Cicadas emerge after 17-year sleep.” The article said that Brood IV, commonly referred to as the Kansan brood, was about to emerge for the first time since 1998. I moved to Nebraska from California in late summer of 1998, which is why I was completely oblivious to Brood IV. The article explained that some species emerge every seven, thirteen, and seventeen years. They mate and die in about three weeks. The females inject their eggs into tree branches, and the baby Cicadas crawl down into the tree roots where they molt and complete their development. So this brood will hang out underground until 2032. It is amazing what a species will do to survive!

A bridge in Platte River State Park. Yes, this is Nebraska!

We missed the actual emergence, but saw much evidence of it. That was fine with me. I was there for the sound. I grew up on the East Coast in New Jersey and Connecticut. We must have had a lot of yearly emerging cicadas, because that huge chorus of rapid ticking seems to be the base track of the soundtrack of my summers. But I wonder if I had witnessed one of these broods that emerge only once in a while. One of my most vivid memories of growing up in Madison, Connecticut is of walking down Horse Pond Road passing a dense thicket of trees and bushes. Apparently, in order to not go completely insane, I had learned to tune out the cicadas. But suddenly, I became aware of this wall of sound and turned to stare in wonder into a large bush by the side of the road. The sound was overwhelming, deafening, like standing under a jet airplane right before it takes off. How was it that I had tuned out this sound before?

"Hey Mister, is it time to go underground yet?"

So on a warm muggy evening in June, by husband and I set out for Platte River State Park in Louisville, Nebraska for a “cicada hike.” Even with the windows closed and the air conditioner on, I could hear them whenever we passed a clump of trees at the edge of the fields along the road to the park. And when we parked the car and opened the door, I was back in a childhood summer, daydreaming to that cicada symphony.

I don’t know where I’ll be in 2032, so I don’t know if I’ll hear Brood IV again. At the end of our visit, my husband and I decided that once in a while, we’ll pack a picnic dinner and go hiking at Platte River State Park, and when we do, it will be nice to know that Brood IV is there, safe underground.

At the end of our visit to Platte River State Park, enjoying an ice cream cone by the lake.

A Playwright's Out of Body Experience

There is magic in the process of taking a play from the page to the stage; for a playwright, this process can feel like an out of body experience.

Timothy Scholl directs actors Cecilia Burkhart and John Burkhart in my ten-minute play Kitchen Garden. 

Back in 2011, my play Kitchen Garden began as a vague idea in my head, which became a conversation with my husband Bob during a long evening walk, and then morphed into a hastily scribbled first draft over a cappuccino in the Mill in College View. It went through various lengths and versions and then lay dormant for four years as nothing more than a computer file. I took a playwriting class, wrote more plays and saw them performed, but always wondered if there was a future for that first play. Then came Angels Playwriting Collective and the First Flight Festival, so I dusted off Kitchen Garden, tightened it into a ten-minute play with the astute feedback from my fellow Collective playwrights, and now am experiencing the magic of watching it make that leap from page to stage.

Cecilia Burkhart and John Burkhart rehearse my ten-minute play Kitchen Garden.

The out of body experience hits me during rehearsals as I watch my amazing director Timothy Scholl find subtext, character traits, motivations, and conflict that enrich the play so much beyond the written word. In succinct direction to the actors, he can communicate ideas that for me are so internalized that I can only get at them indirectly through dialogue. The actors, Cecilia and John Burkhart, inhabit my characters with a stunning familiarity, as if they were inside the characters’ heads, which translates to inside my head, a bit unnerving when you think about it. So watching a rehearsal of my own play is like watching the contents of my head take shape outside myself. Hopefully, I’ll get used to this strange phenomenon by opening night and be able to enjoy seeing my play on stage just like any other audience member, though I seriously doubt it. If you suspect that someone in the audience is having an out of body experience, that would be me.

More information about the Angels Theatre Company First Flight Festival at angelscompany.org.
Contact Brigid through her website at brigidamos.com.

Live Theatre in Nebraska City!

Getting ready to take a bow. Left to Right: Bob Hall, Brigid Amos, Paula Ray, Robin Buckallew, and Bob Graybosch.

"It's live theatre!"

The waiting audience burst out laughing as the staff continued to fiddle with the lights in the conference room, at one point plunging it into utter darkness. The observation came not from an actor but rather from an ebullient audience member. The live theatre had not, in fact started just yet.

Let me back up a bit and explain how we got to that point.

About a week before my husband and I were to leave for a family Christmas/ski vacation in Montana, I received an email from fellow Angels Playwriting Collective member Robin Buckallew saying that she was still looking to fill some roles in a reading of her one act play "Until They Forget". She also had some exciting news about the play: it had been chosen as one of three regional finalists in the Kennedy Center American College Theatre one-act competition. But that reading was to be in Minneapolis toward the end of January. The reading she needed to cast was to take place at the Lied Lodge & Conference Center in Nebraska City, Nebraska on Sunday January 4.

Robin is completing her MFA in Playwriting at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. "Until They Forget" is one of the plays that make up her thesis, and one of the graduation requirements of the program is a reading of an excerpt of a play. Hence the concern about finding actors. When my husband Bob Graybosch got home, I approached him about the idea of the two of us taking the roles. I assured him that it would just be a reading, i.e., sitting at a long table with our scripts open in front of us. At the most, perhaps standing at podiums. What was I thinking?

The reading was scheduled for 5:15 pm, and there was to opportunity to rehearse before convening at 1:30 pm in the timbered lobby of Lied Lodge. The other two actors arrived: Paula Ray, playwright, actress, and psychologist (also an Angels Playwriting Collective member) and her husband Bob Hall, playwright, actor, director, founder and artistic director of Flatwater Shakespeare Company, comic book creator, and artist. We were in great company, and that was reassuring. Robin introduced us to our director Michael Oatman, Playwright-in-Residence of Karamu House in Cleveland, Ohio. We followed him into the conference room where we would rehearse, and after the first read through, Michael cordially dismissed the stage direction reader and announced that we would perform the play as a staged reading (i.e. still reading from the script, but up on our feet, moving around and carrying out the physical action of the play).

Michael is what I would call an "actor's director," and it was such an exciting experience to work with him. He is the type of director who can intuitively sense the potential in actors, and knows how to draw that potential out. My husband Bob has no stage experience (although he and I did once take an acting class with Sarah Imes Borden, and I thought he did quite well.) In a very direct, demanding, but kind way, Michael challenged Bob to find the character within himself, to loosen up, and to deliver some of his lines with confidence to the audience.

I should also say that we were very grateful to have theater veteran Bob Hall in the cast. It is always nice to have a really solid actor that leads the way and whose performance everyone else can latch onto! 

We moved into the big conference hall for one last run through, which brings us to the last minute light checks and other technical scuffling about. After very moving speeches by Charlene A. Donaghy, Robin's playwriting mentor, and by Robin herself, we launched into the performance. Although the play examines serious themes of life and death, there is a great deal of comedy in it, and the very engaged and appreciative audience laughed throughout. We received wonderful comments afterwards, as did Robin for her writing, and we all retired to the Timber Dining Room for a well-

deserved meal. (By the way, I also had a chocolate martini and my husband had a Guinness.)

An epilogue:

A few days after the staged reading, I was hanging up the slacks I wore that day. (In order to tell this story, I have to reveal a bit about my housekeeping habits.) Out of the pocket of the slacks fell a '63 Corvette. OK, that sounds weird, so let me back up again with a spoiler alert. At some point during the play, Bob Hall's character, Larry, pulls a toy '63 Corvette out of his pocket. My character, Andi, takes the car and plays with it for a while. I needed to get the car out of my hands, and it seemed natural to put it in my own pocket. Each time we ran through the play, I handed the car to Bob Hall to put into his pocket, but of course, after the performance, we ate dinner instead. I sent the car to Robin, and she will take it to Minneapolis for the reading there. That little '63 Corvette sure gets around!

Reading through the script. Left to Right: Bob Hall, Paula Ray, Brigid Amos, and Bob Graybosch.

  

An Evening and a Morning in North Platte, Nebraska

You can't see the town of North Platte, Nebraska from the I-80 exit. What you can see there are the repositories of the four great necessities of interstate road tripping: fuel, coffee, food, and last, but not by any stretch of the imagination least, restrooms. Since the recent addition of a Dunkin Donuts, there is also available respectable cappuccino and what I like to call ring-shaped energy food. A mysterious fort-like structure also presides over the exit, and I believe its purpose is to tire out unruly children and make them fall asleep in the minivan as the family pushes forward to Yellowstone or to wherever else they are traveling. I used to think that this scattered collection of gas stations and chain restaurants was North Platte. Back in May, my husband and I took a trip out west that happily shattered my misconceptions.

We arrived fairly late at the hotel, with just enough time to catch dinner at the Depot Restaurant where I had a most delicious salmon salad and photographed the stunning woodwork that gives the place a cozy feel. We liked the place so much that we returned the next day for lunch, and vowed to always try to eat there when we pass by the North Platte exit around meal time.

After dinner, we decided to stroll around the quiet downtown. Not expecting to see much in the way of nightlife, it was quite a surprise to turn a corner and find ourselves dazzled by the Vegas-style bright lights of the old Fox movie theater. The neon display drew us like hapless moths down the street and into the vestibule. It seemed that an event was just ending, and as I searched the posters for some clue as to what we had missed, Bob peeked through the glass of the lobby door and spotted a guitarist signing CDs. I was so distracted by the information on the walls of the vestibule that I never saw the musician. It turned out to be John Davidson, that perpetual passenger of The Love Boat and purveyor of the wacky on That's Incredible. He was performing for season ticket holders of the North Platte Community Playhouse, and it was somehow comforting to know that this guy who once seemed ubiquitous on television was still plugging along as a live performer.

The next day, we spent most of the morning lost in the literary wilds of A to Z Books, a cavernous repository of used books with a small selection of new books mixed in for good measure. The clerk was extremely helpful and friendly, but the inventory was not computerized. It is difficult to believe that a bookstore could operate like that in this day and age, but I really can't blame them. When I looked around at the long walls of tall bookcases stuffed with books on all subject imaginable, when I thought of the daunting task of entering the seemingly endless titles into a computer database, when I thought of even starting such an undertaking, I could easily understand the urge to join the literary luddites. So we were forced to spend hours at A to Z, drifting from bookcase to bookcase, scanning the spines, and pulling out random books to peruse. All in all, a pleasant morning well spent.