Some reasons I’m walking around with “Underneath the Lintel” in my pocket.
Deep in the comments of Goodreads, someone once said that Underneath the Lintel was the best one person show ever written.
Page one of the published text brought a smile to my face. The first production of this play happened at the Actors’ Gang, my old theater. It was directed by Brent Hinckley, who I got to know over a few games of darts in a shed at Oregon Shakespeare festival. And the Librarian was played by Brian Finney, who was one of the kindest and most supportive old school actors at the theater.
Also, I was a librarian, in Poland. I ran the Story Center project in Wroclaw for international families. I collected book donations in the US, shipped them overseas, and opened a space on the weekends inviting the public to borrow amazing kids books, live art theatre books, and Shakespeare texts. I would also perform one person shows, have a read aloud playlist, and organize creative workshops. So… yeah. I like libraries and have thought about collections and cataloging for many years.
The librarian in the play goes through a kind of process that I used to call following the runnels. When I graduated college, I had to be intentional with learning. When I’m in a performance or working on something, I love to find out more about the play, the playwright, the original production, the context of the theater, the artistic director, the background of the creative teams. Whatever it is, I need something to lead me into the wider world around the plays I make. This is, in essence, what this play is all about. This kind of upstream thinking – going back to truth itself.
I was completely shattered by a whole range of John Green‘s podcast-now-book “The anthroprocene reviewed.” I love his take on weirdness in an essay about Liverpool and a Polish goalkeeper. In his Notes app review, I feel like he has mapped the digital terrain I’m always walking. With my family all asleep, his review of Auld Lang Sine brought me to tears while I was cleaning my kitchen.
This tangent of John Green is to say some of those ideas that shattered me and cracked me open about this vast and unusual world are captured in “Underneath the Lintel.” We are here and we need to make something of it. We need to make meaning.
I teach this to middle school and high school children, the arts help us make meaning. I have this need, right here right now, to make meaning of the big things happening around me. I know there is a movie script in it somewhere. But I don’t have an ending. “Underneath the Lintel” is giving me something to dance with while I stumble, shuffle, and trip my way through life.