Letters from the Earth

THEATER 71
-fall 2003
Working on Mark Twain's LETTERS for the monologue show, i realized i wanted to do an entire one-man show of it someday. I figured it would be in some more metropolitan locale, as i wanted to do it with full nudity. But i knew i’d be on the beach a few months longer anyway, saving money for NY, so when Mark asked whether i’d be interested in doing a solo LETTERS at the Holmes House, i said yes. I prepared it pretty much alone (indeed, Donna and Lucy were the only Players to even see the full show). Chris had left town, but John offered to do tech. He was great company. The one or two nights he couldn’t make it, Donna stepped in - she was there for each performance. I adapted a fuller treatment of Letters 2 and 3, did Letter 8 as i’d already worked it, and added Letters 10 and 11. Our set was candlelit, with red gel effects and a fog machine. I got fancier devil horns, and added a choir robe, plus the Caiaphas robe from JCS. I toyed with doing different accents for each letter, but ultimately kept the southern one throughout. Carrie made beautiful show posters (no charge this time), and i added one final encore performance at the Orpheus itself, which was very special and brought great delight to Tony. Happily, Amanda caught the second half of that one too. Our run had small but appreciative crowds. Letter 8 (the sex one) was still the biggest crowd-pleaser, but my new favorite was 11, which details the scope of man’s brutality to man, highlighted by a tale of the Minnesota massacre of 1862, in which the natives raped and crucified a family, then got really nasty. Very powerful. We got a nice photo in the News Press, and a nice article by Ron Heffner at the Beach Observer.