Below The Fold

In about a month and a half, Below The fold: a blog on stage will be debuting at the John Hand Theatre in Lowry.

I’m still taking it all in, myself.

When my sister approached me well over a year ago and said she wanted to adapt my writing in this space to the stage, I thought she was crazy. I never intended these musings and recollections to be anything other than what it is; a blog. Indeed, the definition of the word blog has evolved since I started this thing, even though my approach really hasn’t. Blogs today have become more than just personal spaces—intellectual masturbation, if you will. They’re more often social hubs, informational networks and grass-roots citizen journalism portals.

But not here. Below The Fold remains my own private world; albeit one I have visited far too infrequently as of late. It’s been a long year with little personal time for flights of nostalgia, and thus this space has languished in silence more often than not.

But the great thing about the Internet is any one of my entries over the last seven years (ish) live and breathe on their own; finding new life for random passersby and rubberneckers on the information highway. And thus, my sister thought that some of this material was good enough to find its own life in a whole new medium, with a collection of fresh faces and differing perspectives on the stories of my life.

So she cajoled me into letting her take a crack at it. She pulled together a collection of some of her favorite entries balanced with a sense of what might work in a live setting, and cobbled together a rough idea of a script, which I hacked at, then she hacked at, then I sculpted and polished, then she hacked at, then I buffed to its final gleam.

Now, it’s all in her hands. She’s put together an amazing cast of people who are in rehearsals now, learning to tell these stories as if they were their own.

There’s almost no fiction in this script—with the exception of one comedic scene in the second act—which probably makes it even a little more risky a venture. Add to that the fact that it’s the very first production of a new theatre company (Equinox), and will be performed on off-nights in March (Sunday, Mondays and Tuesdays, I believe), and the benchmark for success will simply be finding bodies to put in seats.

So I invite you, my friends, to witness this venture and share with us a moment 30-some-odd years in the making. Please pick a night and come out. Support a highly talented cast, burgeoning director and untested playwright. I don’t think you will be disappointed.

And if you are, it’s totally my sister’s fault.

Pics, from top: The cast of Below The Fold: a blog on stage at the first read-through, January 10, 2009. Deb Flomberg (Director) and Ryan Mattingly (Stage Manager/dude who does a lot of other stuff including keeping everyone in stitches)