BERZERK!!! Tonight!

12:00pm, 03/21/09

When I got to the house in northern River West, Insurgent Theatre co-founder Tracy Doyle and a few others were in the process of assembling BELTs (bacon, egg, lettuce, tomato) sandwiches. It wasn’t long before everyone was sitting around facetiously discussing the possibility for holding open auditions for a father for Peter Woods. I’m not sure exactly how we got on the topic, but it doesn’t matterwe weren’t there for that. Insurgent theatre co-founders Doyle and Rex Winsome, myself and three other writers had assembled to bang out a script for tonight’s BERZERK!!! in a single session. The script would be completed in only a couple of hours with each writer given a pair of ten minute periods in rotation to work on the thing. Alamo Basement co-founder Mike Hanlon and his all-Hanlon group of writers were doing the exact same thing on vacation on the other side of the continent.. . . and the whole thing will be produced in exactly 24 hours . . . thus was the format of this month’s BERZERK!!!

While doubtlessly quite close as a family, the piece that the Hanlons were likely to produce was inevitably going to be pretty coherent and consistent. The Insurgent end of tonight’s program comes from a group of writers who don’t know each other nearly as well, which actually ended up producing a pretty interesting, if completely uneven script, in spite of our best intentions. It looks like it’s going to be a lot of fun . . .

With food duly consumed and random bits of small talk aside, we set about the business of setting things up for the writing session. The writers I would be sharing the script with were: Actor/author Jason Hames. Hames has appeared in a number of Insurgent’s shows over the years, most notably in the original cast of Paint The Town and Golden Apollo, if memory serves . . . Hames would be starting the script before passing it off to me. Once I had finished my first ten minutes, I would be passing the script off to Kurt Jensen. I remember Kurt best as the guy who shot Tracy last month in the short I wrote for February’s BERZERK!!! The guy had a talent for improvisation that made a strong impression . . . Jensen claimed an inability to type and think at the same time, so he was the one guy who worked in longhand . . . finally the script passed to Peter J Woodsthe anchor of the group who would wrap-up the first half of the script before passing it back to Jason Hames for his second stint and so on . . .

One of the first things we looked at as a group was a photo of the set we would be working with. As BERZERK!!! is happening at the Alchemist Theatre these days, the set we would be working with is their set for WHO’S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOLF? . . . which is interesting, as the cast we would be working with was two men and two women, just like the Albee play. Interestingly enough, we didn’t know which four were going to be in our end of the play. As I recall Doyle, Woods, Hames and Jensen were all set to be in the show, but they could just as well have ended up in the Hanlon-end of the program as well.

Alsoin an interesting twist, Liz Shipe, who plays Honey in Alchemist’s Virginia Wolf is also going to be part of the program, which is going to make the whole program feel a bit like a mutation of Albee for those of us who have already seen it . . .

Having been the one person in the room who had already seen the production, I could answer a few questions about the set for the rest of the writers. The set includes a porch with a small swing . . . the rest of the guys were delighted to know that it was a functioning swing, so it ended up being a huge fixation for us for some reason . . . and two crucial parts of the script ended up being the swing and a basement which exists somewhere offstage . . .

Writing proceeded pretty rapidly . . . with Jason Hames initially setting-up a fairly straightforward interaction between a couple of characters, which gradually mutated. Somewhere around Hames’ second go at the scrip, it got excessively surreal . . . and ended up being really self-referential. The four of us never really worked together as a whole group on a single project, so the project ended up being kind of disjointedincreasingly so towards the end. This being said, Woods did what feels like an excellent job of wrapping everything-up . . . very pragmatically surreal . . .

The actors will have been working on it for several hours now . . . as I write this, the show opens in something like nine hours. I don’t remember a lot of the specifics of the script, but I know it involved fake mustaches, gunshots and swinging. The line “I fear inertia,” seemed pretty compelling to me for some reason and I have at least one actress saying that line a few times throughout the production . . . the rest is a strange haze.

This month’s BERZERK!!! will be staged tonight (March 22nd) at 6pm at the Alchemist Theatre.