"It's a play, and I'm in it!"

I have an irrational fear of opening sentences. As an itinerant and inconsistent chronicler of a few artistic strains which come across my path, I’m concerned with tone, with taming that precarious balance between content and whimsy, and the opening sentence says so much about what lies ahead.

This is not what you are here for!

You are here, presumably, to know about Swampoodle? Ah, yes… what is Swampoodle! Well, to quote our erstwhile author, one Thomas Swift of Castletown, it’s a play, I suppose, and I’m in it. (Sorry, Chris.) As some might remember, I blogged (and photographed, and tweeted) rather incessantly about the rehearsal process during our January sojourn to Ireland, though this was ostensibly connected to my travel journal, and mysteriously, I have not continued the process stateside. (Most likely because I am not traveling!) My character in the play, however, is a blogger – a bit of Swiftian meta-marketing, if you will – so, if for no other reason than to make that believable, I suppose I ought to continue the trend?

And truth be told, there is so much to report on! We picked up with the poodle in mid-April, our Irish cohorts having braved the icy mid-Atlantic voyage (OK, they took planes) to join us for considerably longer (6 weeks) than our too-brief week-long stay in the auld sod. (This is what happens when governments prioritize culture-making!). After a couple of weeks puttering around at different rehearsal locations – it’s rather depressing to see how many vacant future cube farms our capitol city holds – we finally ended up in our cozy NoMA storefront space about a 5 minute walk from the Uline Arena/Washington Coliseum/What-the-hell-is-that-montrosity-protruding-from-the-red-line building, where we will commemorate the victims of the Irish plague drought potato famine - a notorious mid-19th century crime-riddled neighborhood whose very name comes from a portmanteau of “swamp” and “puddle.” Raise your hand if you knew that Washington, DC was built on a flimsy swamp called Tiber Creek?

This long-neglected area has blown up in terms of development and the great folks at NoMA BID are helping to urge this on; having been inside the Harris Teeter a few times I don’t think I’ve ever seen such pretty people in my life. Then again I’ve never been to South America.

Ahem. I still haven’t answered the question: What is Swampoodle? In a way, I don’t think any of us have, though we perhaps have a better idea. Wikipedia will tell you it was an Irish shantytown, the first major Irish settlement in America’s capitol city during the famine of the 1850s, an area which has never been just one thing, but like the country which cradles it, has existed in a perpetual state of being turned upon itself. The people who lived there, their stories, their passions, their loves and heartbreaks are forever relegated to the trash transfer center of history, much as ours will be. (All except bloggers, whose daily minutiae will remain archived in the permacloud for future generations to ignore.) During our week in Castletown we spent time reading contemporary newspaper accounts of Sadie Gibsons, Patrick Ferbans and John Mahoneys; even given the hyperbolic journalistic style of the day (“Bennett responded at variance with the rules of etiquette!”), it’s obvious these were not small people. “When men like that walked in the room, women fainted and men jumped out the window,” indeed.

So imagining the larger-than-life characters who inhabited this patch of grass – that’s part of the story of Swampoodle. But there’s more. (“This play isn’t only about Irish people!”) It’s also about the Uline Arena, built on Swampoodle grounds in 1941, which taken alone has more character than a Damon Runyan novel. We’ve rehearsed in the Uline a handful of times now, and the thought has occurred to me that we probably don’t even need a play; we could just walk audiences through this space and tell them to imagine a play, and the unbelievable ambiance would do our jobs for us. I believe the first three words I spoke in the place, even after having spent a week studying it, were “No. Effing. Way.” (Seriously, folks, you have never been in a building like this. It’s like being in the Titanic without the danger of drowning.) But obviously we do have a play, and I think a very interesting one,  pieced together by a crackerjack production team and some wonderful local and Irish talents.

So adding the history of the Uline, we now must account for roller derbies and Ice Capades, Roy Rogers, Red Auerbach, and Rocky Marciano, James and Chuck Brown, a Nation of Islam rally attended by leaders of the American Nazi Party (who made a contribution?!), and of course, its major claim to fame, the first US performance of those four lads from Liverpool. So yeah… that’s easily accomplished. But I think we’re up to the task. I’ve never worked on a project that’s anything like this, and the talent, imagination, and commitment in the room is a force itself. Suffice to say that from a tonal perspective, I think the Swampoodle we’ve willed into being makes “Springtime for Hitler” look like “Our Town.”

I’m not sure if I’ll write again, though there are many possible strands I could pick up… the experience of being involved in devising a work of art (and its subsequent influence on my own creative work)… trying to truthfully capture an era which might be recognizable to the persons who lived through it (I’m hoping some of the Uline neighbors stop by, a few of whom have lived there since the 1950s)…  the re-imagining of history… my favorite spots in the building… but I think for now this will suffice. After all, we have a show to put up, time is precious, and as an artist, I must focus on my craft! Such as learning how to do leg kicks in those godforsaken flippers during the Nation of Islam/water follies scene…

Cheers,
Jason