If all the world’s a stage, where exactly IS the green room?

   More apologies are in order before this posting begins.

   With Uncle Fun still holed up at The Fortress of Funitude, and Sparky busy taking notes during our rehearsals for The Best Audience Ever, the regular roster of posters for this blog has been otherwise occupied. Most of my time in between rehearsals has been taken up trying to figure out what Sparky’s notes actually say (much less mean), so I’m afraid that contact with the outside world has been somewhat in abeyance of late. I’d like to redress the situation by giving the floor to one of the two characters in The Best Audience Ever, which debuts three weeks from today at the Cook Theater during the IndyFringe festival (you can tell I’m pressed for time—I’m not even bothering to conceal the essential unsubtlety of this shameless plug). This recent letter from Dr. Henry Irving Stunch, professor of Audienceology and Director-General of the Centre for Advanced Researches on Theatricality, may shed some light on the tone and tenor, if not the specific content, of our upcoming show. (CAUTION: What follows should not be construed to be anything close to verifiable fact, except in the sense of maintaining the truth of the fictional world of a theatrical text.)

Dear Mr. Coosings,  

   Thank you for allowing me to make use of your web-based log to inform the general public about the institution which makes a show like The Best Audience Ever possible, and maybe even necessary. The Centre for Advanced Researches on Theatricality is a worldwide organization dedicated to investigating the interactions between performers, audience members, theatre support staff, hangers-on, obsessed fans, and officers of the court (when restraining orders are called for).  Through a series of formal, informal, and occasionally slapdash research paradigms, we aim to give the world a clearer sense of what it means to watch somebody doing something, to be watched while doing something, and whether we couldn’t all just watch ourselves and save a bit of time.

   Here is just a sample of the work currently being done under The Centre’s auspices:

-An in-depth study, in field and laboratory settings, of all aspects of Making Scenes in Restaurants (our key finding thus far: the sentence “ ‘Well-done’ does not mean ‘burnt to a crisp’!”  must be delivered in three distinct sections, each one a semi-tone higher than the last, for maximum effect).

-A draft resolution for a Universal Declaration of the Rights of Assistant Stage Managers, to be tabled at the U.N. General Assembly in the spring of 2013.

-Workshops and staged readings of a collectively-created work-in-progress which uses the dramaturgical techniques and devices of Sophocles to re-examine one of the great personalities of 20^th-century stage and screen, entitled Oedipus Rex Harrison (soon to be adapted into a musical, under the working title of My Fair Laius).

-Ongoing researches into how old a cultural reference can be before it makes a joke bomb as badly as that last one probably did.

-A month-long retreat to determine the potential significance of fly-fishing to a deeper understanding of the works of Shakespeare (our Assistant Director had a research grant and a rented cabin, and found a way of putting them together).

-Recruitment of contributors for the upcoming fourth volume of The Encyclopedia of Sight Gags in Radio Theatre (from “Lips, Edgar Bergen’s, moving during ventriloquism” to “Polar Bear in Jack Benny’s Vault”).

-Final preparations for an upcoming multidisciplinary conference to discuss and share findings on the relative contributions to modern choreography and dance styles made by Martha Graham, Alvin Ailey, and the Keystone Kops.

   This, of course, is but an infinitesimal fraction of the wide range of activities undertaken by the Centre for Advanced Researches on Theatricality on a daily (sometimes an almost-weekly) basis. I can’t find the rest of what I was going to put in, under all these piles of submissions and back-dated invoices on my desk, and I have to re-park my car before it gets another ticket, so it’ll have to do for now.

   Hope this helps. Write if you get work.

   Yours sincerely,

Henry Irving Stunch

Director-General, Centre for Advanced Researches on Theatricality

Professor emeritus, William Hartnell School of Alternatives to Dialogue Memorisation